Oh, Vin Diesel. You make so many... interesting career choices. The gaming world was hit with a double dose of Diesel back in April, with the release of the second Chronicles of Riddick game and Wheelman, starring the gravelly voiced Next Big Thing of 2002 who faded into the ether, before returning triumphantly to the box office heap with the success of Fast and Furious.

Wheelman was announced way back in 2006, and at the same time it was announced that the game would be a tie-in/prologue to an eventual film starring Diesel as the game's character, mysterious getaway driver and international bon vivant Milo Burik. Yes, it was Just Imagine Vin Diesel With Rich Wilkes Creating The Transporter. But Diesel's post Pacifier stock had already slid dangerously off the scale, and the movie project stalled.

The game, developed by Midway Newcastle and Diesel's own Tigon Studios, however, soldiered on silently for three years, until it was released in March. Given Midway's financial troubles, it wound up being released by Ubisoft. And whaddaya know, the game's selling well enough that the film project's been revived. Little consolation, I suppose, to the recently closed Midway Newcastle though.

Wheelman isn't the best swan song, it's barely above average, but it has a few things in its favor that make me wonder about the experience that might have been.

The game puts the pedal to the medal from the moment you start a new game, as Milo finds himself helping beautiful local thief Catalina escape from a police brigade. This is one of the most fun tutorial levels I've ever played, and really gets your hopes up for a fun experience. There's a lot of car combat, as the game lets you flick the right analog stick left and right and forward to ram cars off the road. The D-pad lets you pull off special moves when it's filled, like speeding and slow motion shooting. It really gets the gamer salivating for the carnage to come, as Milo and Catalina destroy downtown Barcelona to escape.

When the mission finally ends, though, you find yourself out in the open world, which... doesn't feel that open. Oh sure, it's a massive semi-recreation of Barcelona, but the buildings, streets, cars, passerby, and architecture all look distressingly bland. Most streets blur together, it's actually quite difficult to navigate your way to a destination... unsurprising, then, that you can warp to any story mission OR side mission from Milo's PDA mini-map. Yes, there are the requisite collectibles, 100 plaster lion sculptures (YAWN) or 50 Cinematic Stunt Jumps (better), but collecting them just nets you the Achievement, and aside from that there's not reason at all to not simply warp to each mission whenever it unlocks. There aren't many shortcuts or interesting nooks and crannies to be found; all open areas are just arenas for the story missions.

Flint Dille and John Platten, who have worked on titles Transformers: The Game, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and, not coincidentally, the two Chronicles of Riddick games, have crafted a story that... well, it's not much of a story at all. Milo is given information about the local crime lords in Barcelona, and proceeds to run various jobs for them. Through each progressive job he slowly engineers a three way mob war, but the three groups are ruthless, uninteresting thugs that seem only defined by their ethnicity and fashion sense. It's also kind of strange that none of these guys realize Burik's playing them. Plus, we don't really get a sense of Burik's motivations and why he's doing what he's doing until the very end of the game, and the final revelation elicits a big "huh?" more than anything else. There's a subplot about Catalina and her partner that's slightly more promising, and Catalina's a likable character, but again, details are left far too vague that I simply didn't care. If it weren't for some of the creativity of the scenarios that the story missions present, it wouldn't be worth following at all. Which is a real shame, and a bit of a surprise, since the story is one of the best parts of Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay.

The side missions are varied, and fun. There's the standard races, chase missions, but also car assassination missions- you ram and crash a car into oblivion- and property damage missions. You can play them for the usual successive higher ratings and scores that will add upgrades to your drving skills, but the effects of these upgrades feel awfully minimal, and it's easy to complete the game with only doing a few of them.

The gameplay is where the meat of Wheelman is to be found, and it shines... as long as you're behind said wheel.

Driving controls are generally strong and responsive, and all the vehicles in the game have a decent variety. But what really sets the game apart from the usual driving sequences of open world games is the other neat things you can do, like shoot out a car's tires. Or use bullet time to swerve around and fire a few well placed bullets into a car's engine, obliterating it. There's the airjack move, which is pretty awesome. Simply hold the B button, wait for the arrow above a car in front of you to turn green, and Milo will spring for the car he's driving, and fly like the wind to the car in front of him. This is a great way to getting around your car accruing damage, and hilarious to watch to boot. I guarantee if you'll unlock the achievement connected to this move very quickly.

But my favorite gameplay mechanic is the car ramming. While you can shoot at cars to damage them, you can also flick the right analog stick to veer you car to the left, right, or forward to ram an gang car or cop car that's on your tail. Hit and shoot a car enough times and KABOOM! It's a riot.

Once you get out of the car, however, everything falls apart. The on foot controls are clunky and awkward. The camera holds forth at foot level, and can't really be adjusted like it can with the car. Milo runs around with a herkimer jerkimer animation that just looks silly. And then you whip out a gun, and it gets even worse. The game offers stiff auto-aiming, based very slightly off GTAIV's auto-aiming that never feels quite right. What really knocked me flat, however, was what happens every time you eliminate an enemy... the screen blurs for a moment, almost as if someone pushed the degauss button on your monitor. Needless to say, this is distracting as hell and mucks up the gameplay a lot. What sort of design choice is this? Every on foot section of the game becomes a stultifying chore.

The graphics in the game are also somewhat subpar for a 360 game. In addition to the unimaginative design of Barcelona, the character models in the cut scenes are horrifically animated. Diesel himself looks the worst- Milo feels less like a person than some sort of disembodied golem. His tired "And Vin Diesel as Vin Diesel" line readings do not help matters. The look of the game is just bland.

The music and sound is just fine, when you can hear it. There's a suprising number of genres on the soundtrack, but  the music volume is generally low and you can't change the songs during missions. Since most of the time wandering around is a useless endeavour, this is another pointless design choice that made me wonder who was playtesting this thing.

As frustrating an experience Wheelman was, after a while I found it growing on me despite its flaws, of which there are many. There's a sort of scrappy quality to the gameplay that's appealing as it is tiresome. Midway Newcastle hit on some really good ideas here, but were unable to build a 100% workable game around them. I'm still going to mourn the loss of Midway Newcastle, though, because they were really onto something. If only they had hit the mark.