Wheelman

Announced a couple of years ago, Wheelman has been little more than a cool trailer to most of the gaming press. However, that changed at Midway’s Gamers Day event, as they unveiled a playable build of the game. Best described as a cross between GTA and Burnout, Wheelman focuses on providing an immersive cinematic driving experience that lets you feel like you’re in a movie. The game does well in this regard, offering up some awesome driving moves and some truly cool action elements.

For those who are unfamiliar with the game, Wheelman represents a project being concurrently worked on by Midway’s Newcastle studio and Vin Diesel’s Tigon Studios. Additionally, the game will feature both the voice and likeness of Diesel, who will play a getaway man performing a variety of jobs for different criminal elements throughout the city of Barcelona, Spain. The game is balanced about 80-20 percent driving to on-foot action, meaning that most of the story will unfold during some hairy car chases.

Behind the wheel, you’ll have a lot of cool moves to perform. You’ll be able to melee other cars, by tapping the right thumbstick in their direction, sending them into a gnarly wreck. Additionally, you can do Aimed Attacks, which will essentially slow everything down, putting you into a bullet-time mode and letting you shoot at a specific target on an enemy’s vehicle. The Cyclone is the Aimed Attacks cooler, big brother, initiated when you put your car into a 180-degree spin, slow down time and shoot away.

The game is focused primarily on the driving portions, but the on-foot elements don’t slouch, either. You’ll have to do a couple of jobs where you’ll have to melee fight and get into shootouts, ducking behind cover in order to keep from getting mowed down. However, things will always get back to driving, whether it’s a crazy escape mission or an escort mission.

The game also has some bonus-type games that you can play like Rampage, where you’ll have to single out a certain object type in the environment, hit it to gain a huge multiplier, and then plow into as many cars as you can to get the best score, and so on. Wheelman is shaping up to be a fine entry into the action-driving genre, and should be something to get excited for when it launches later this year.