Wheelman

Wheely rather good

The more recklessly you drive the faster you'll fill up the game's focus gauge. This can be used to give you short nitro boosts or more interestingly to trigger one of two special attacks. Aimed Shot slows down time and pulls the camera inside the car allowing you the chance to take out enemies in range with single, super powered shots. Cyclone is similar but takes place while Vin pulls the car through a 360 degree spin giving you a perfect chance to take out anything following you.

As is regularly pointed out to you during the first few missions, 'The car is the weapon' when it comes to getting rid of the unwanted attention of other vehicles. Using the right stick you can slam your car left and right into anything that's got too close while a tap forward or back will give anything in front or behind you a quick shunt too. This isn't an ability that should be thought of as merely offensive either; the nimble movement this allows can come in hugely handy for dodging out of the way of attacks too. Do enough damage to your enemies this way and you'll be able to deliver a final finishing blow to destroy them in spectacular fashion. It is possible to use your gun while driving, in fact some missions insist on it to take out enemies tyres and such like, but its often just as easy and often far more fun to use your car to do the damage itself.

Wheelman isn't a game without faults though and it's somewhat ironic that most of them show their head as soon as Vin stops being a wheelman. In what comes across as a misguided attempt to add some variety to proceedings you'll sometimes get to step out of your car and complete some sections of the missions on-foot. While expecting these third-person shooter sections to be Gears of War is a little unfair they do stumble badly with combat feeling both unwieldy and too easy thanks to sluggish controls, auto target lock and painfully stupid enemy AI.

Back on a positive note, the Unreal engine powered graphics are lovely to look at. The city may lack the intimate detail and 'real' city feel of GTA but the summery colour pallet and road layout designed for speed and vehicular combat more than make up for it. The game takes every chance to show itself off too, the camera often detaching from the action during a spectacular jump or stylish kill to frame the incident from a more suitably cinematic camera angle.

The only slight disappointment graphically are the character models. As with a lot of games running on the Unreal engine they tend to look a little like they've been smeared in olive oil and wrapped in Clingfilm which is a shame. Mr Diesel himself is by far the best looking (from a technical point of view...) of the characters, a fact which is probably as much down to his lack of hair, a feature the engine clearly isn't great at, as to his star status.

Much like a lot of the leading mans films, Wheelman is brainless entertainment without any pesky delusions of grandeur to trip over. Yes the plot is daft and the action as unrealistic as it comes but crucially it's also, for the most part, thoroughly enjoyable. The on-foot sequences are an obvious weakness and the lack of any kind of multiplayer counts against it too but that aside Wheelman does what it says on the tin really well. Its bright and colourful brand of Hollywood summer blockbuster style gaming is great fun and the perfect antidote to the gritty realism found in so many other titles at the moment.

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By Paul Newcombe