Sometimes the difference between a good game and a truly great game is the often bandied about practice of ‘polish,’ those extra weeks and months that developers spend on ensuring that their game experience is perfectly smooth, not giving any gamer a chance to get distracted by badly implemented mechanics or iffy graphical glitches.

While the term ‘polish,’ or the sense of a ‘lack of polish,’ is too often sighted as the reason one game is a joy to behold, while the other is a chore to play, it’s probably more accurate to attribute such ideas to the ‘presentation’ of the game, and how the developers have made certain that players of their games don’t notice the behind-the-scenes goings on while they enjoy the experience of playing the game, rather than nitpicking all of the finicky details that should have been scrubbed, or ‘polished,’ away before anyone played it.

Wheelman is a game that would have benefited from an extra month or two of ‘polish,’ so as to ensure that no-one would be able to say “It’s a good game, but…” This is the case, however, as Wheelman delivers an excellent blockbuster experience from moment to moment, accompanied by some truly evolutionary features, but it’s the moments in-between the great (and even exceptional) instances of Wheelman that drag the entire experience down a few notches (if even by a few) towards the end.

The story set-up is fairly cliché, if only as far as blockbuster movies go – you (in the virtual body of Vin Diesel, but under the name Milo Burik) play an undercover CIA operative, trying to wiggle his way into the inner circles of a few gangs in Barcelona, Spain, mostly through tough man tactics (i.e. showing how tough you are) and getting hired as a wheelman for their shady undertakings - someone who can handle a car, take on missions, and drive really fast without getting everybody killed.

That nicely sums up what you’ll be up to during Wheelman – driving around the city of Barcelona, really fast, most likely under duress as rival gang members shoot at you and try to smear you off of the road with their own car. You’re not exactly defenceless, though, as you’re effectively able to use your car of choice as a weapon, using your controller’s left stick to steer and the right stick to shove your vehicle left, right or forward, smashing any other car that happens to be in the way.

The main story missions, which are easily accessible via your PDA-style map, are each accompanied by a little cinematic which clues you in to what you’ll be doing, and lead nicely into the action which, again, usually involves aggressively driving through city streets, fending off attackers or protecting your vehicle as the mission requires.

A little ways into the game, you’re able to perform a move called the ‘airjack,’ the ability to jump out of your moving vehicle across to another vehicle, kicking out the current occupant and hijacking that car in the process. While it whispers shades of Halo 2/3 (with those games’ ground-to-moving-vehicle hijack ability), it’s given its own identity in the way you’re able to pull off the manoeuvre in high speed car chases and, if your previous car was extremely damaged, it will explode just as you jump to the next car, injecting a healthy dose of ‘action movie’ spectacle and satisfaction into the experience.

Another ability you’re given access to fairly early on in the game is the option of shooting out of your car to further fortify your defences, which is made easier by making use of a special ability meter, which is filled by speeding, pulling off handbrakes and corner drifts and smashing opponent’s cars. You can deplete this special ability meter by using speed boosters for a short duration of time, or pulling off two additional manoeuvres – one allowing you to focus (slow down time) and aim your bullet shots at enemy cars’ tires and weak spots, and the other allowing you to quickly turn your car around in a 180 degree spin, focus, and then carefully place your gunfire.

To begin with, this special ability meter is quite small, but can be increased as you take on more side quests (unrelated to the main story) scattered throughout your in-game map, with missions such as driving important people around in a taxi to their destination, finding, airjacking and delivering special cars for order, taking on races, and others. You’re given ranks for how well you complete each of these side missions and, if you’re good enough, you unlock more in which to get involved.

There are a lot of them, and by the end of the game your map will hardly have a spot left without a special marker denoting a side mission, which can get a little visually confusing. The markers are left on the map, even after completion, ostensibly to easily allow you to try them again and get a better rank, but it may have been better to turn them slightly transparent, or put them on a different map option so they don’t end up drowning your view.

Up until about a quarter of the way into Wheelman, the game keeps nicely within itself, never stepping over the bounds of what it does best, which is delivering high octane, fast paced, adrenaline-filled car chases. Throughout this time, your avatar is given agency within the world as you’re able to move your little Vin Diesel around in the third-person, but without much purpose, which hangs over the game like some kind of omen – why can players do this without actually being given any real reason to do so?

Further into the game, however, you’re given the answer, right about the time you’re given your first weapon to shoot. Yep, your little virtual Vin Diesel can move around in the third-person and actually use weaponry to shoot at moving targets, i.e. whoever the bad guy is at the time. The movement and shooting mechanics vaguely mirror those found in full-blown third-person action shooters, but without the ‘polish,’ finesse and care that has been massaged into something such as, say Gears of War.

Now, Wheelman isn’t trying to be Gears of War, or Uncharted or even Tomb Raider, but in giving you these separate missions in which you’re using mechanics that are inspired by those games, it’s putting itself into their territory and effectively stepping outside the bounds of its core competencies (i.e. the aforementioned driving action). The worst thing about these sections is that they don’t do much wrong, exactly, but gamers have come to expect expertly tuned third-person shooter mechanics by now, and by incorporating these sections in Wheelman, they can be seen as outdated, clunky and unintuitive by comparison – the earlier (3D) Grand Theft Auto shooting mechanics would be a good indicator of where Wheelman is coming from.

It would have taken a significant amount of time to improve (or ‘polish’) these gameplay elements, and then a further amount of time to take advantage of the excellently implemented mechanics by fleshing out this aspect of the game with more (and better designed) levels dedicated to high octane, fast-paced, adrenaline-filled shootouts that could match the driving sections.

About three-quarters into Wheelman, both the driving and shooting aspects of the game start melding together more closely, as the missions degenerate into a blend of unbalanced, back-and-forth, frustrating experiences that leave you with very little patience. That’s no way to end a game, very efficiently souring the enjoyable, solid sections of earlier missions.

Maybe the well storied events troubling publishers Midway lately had something to do with how Wheelman’s quality spikes from the very beginning, but then continues to decline, as though mirroring the difficulties Midway has been undergoing over the last few months (and years).

If this is the case, it could be the reason that Wheelman was never given enough time for the developers to ‘polish’ the areas of the game that needed attention, after they settled on the idea of providing an excellent action driving experience, but then never managed to ensure it was uniformly excellent across all gameplay disciplines by stepping out of the bounds of the game’s core competencies. This leaves us with the old chestnut, that Wheelman is good, but…

Pros: Provides good, solid inventive action racing mechanics; story is suitably engaging with voice acting to match; graphically competent; effectively conveys ‘action movie’ vibe throughout

Cons: Third-person shooting sections feel outdated, ‘clunky’; missions degenerate into uncreative fetch quests and unbalanced tests of patience; freezing issues encountered, at one point locking up the console

Purchase: