Players will likely have to daisy chain the move together, hopscotching between cars in a pursuit or chase. The whole transition is smooth as butter, and you can almost see it being necessary later in Wheelman. It’s a button press that lets Vin Diesel’s character get out of the car and jump onto another. What do you do then? Well, Midway Newcastle created something called an airjack. It’s just best to lose your pursuers in traffic or back alleys.īut sometimes, you can drive just enough to see your car flaming. Better yet, if you manage to jack a big-rig, they can pretty much do whatever they want on the roadway.Īs for the motorcycle, it’s best not to try to slam into a car with that. It can get damaged a bit and the top speed and handling will suffer a little, but you can get still get by. A regular sedan works fine when you’re slamming in a boulevard turnpike. Of course, driving like this works with certain cars better than others.
Do it right and you’ll see spectacular crashes with flames and drivers doing impersonations of crash test dummies. Instead of grinding a car to death and nudge it against a wall, the team created a system where players use the right thumb stuck to slam a car forward and sideways. It’s the players skill.”Īnd to that end, Midway Studios Newscastle modified the controls to make the chase missions more arcadelike. “It’s not the car that lets players finish a mission. “Cars are weapons they’re tools,” Himmerick said. It’s what players do with them that’s important. There are dozens of vehicles though, including motorcycles and big-rigs, which all have their strengths and weaknesses.īut the vehicles aren’t the focus of Wheelman. The rest of the cars may be recognizable (like a Smart Car), but no brand names are used. One is the Opal Astra and the other is a Pontiac. Wheelman only has two licensed vehicles, both from GM. Players can drive wherever they want and the setting has all sorts of thoroughfares and alleys and office buildings to explore.
The game has a lot of open world elements to it.
“All the great action scenes, the Ronin, The Bourne Identitystuff, the D ieheard: With a Vengeance were all great inspiration for us.”Īnd that’s as plain as day as you start off your adventure as a wheelman in a bank heist in Barcelona, Spain.
“A lot of parts of Wheelman were designed to feel like a movie and more specifically put the player in control of their own movie as if they were the person living out the action movie sequence,” he said. He showed me some of the finer points a title that wants to give players that summer action thrill. I had a chance to check out the game this week with Shaun Himmerick, the executive producer.
( Check out the demo for that game some time.) And he’ll be starring in Midway’s Wheelmanm which is coming out this month. He may even unseat 50 Cent as the biggest real-life star in gaming.ĭiesel will be appearing in Starbreeze’s upcoming title The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. In Hollywood, Vin Diesel may not be the biggest name on the block, but when it comes to video games, the guy’s mug is all over the place.