Leaving America: Vin Diesel’s The Wheelman

Barcelona, a fresh change to the American City of Crime – New York.

by dkpatriarch

©2008 David Hilton

“`America is known throughout the world for its love of the automobile, its massive cities, its entertainment industry, the right to bear arms, and, unfortunately, its violence; all of which make for a great sandbox-type gaming context.

“`The epitome of this is GTA IV where gamers from around the world are busily pursuing the criminal’s American Dream, working their way up from immigrant nobody to successful crim in a pseudo New York. But the ‘land of opportunity’ has become overused as a setting for open-world sandbox action and street car racing games.

Therefore, it is with much excitement that I have been following Midway’s collaborative game project with Vin Diesel called The Wheelman, which takes place in an open world city elsewhere. In fact, the running, gunning and driving mayhem will take place in one of my favorite cities, Barcelona in Catalunya Spain.

True Crime, GTA, Crazy Taxi, Saint’s Row, Crackdown, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Burnout Paradise, The Italian Job (later version), Midnight Club and no doubt many more games like these to come are all open-world street-racing or action driving games set in big American cities. As someone who has both lived and travelled in North America for a big portion of his life and who has played so many games that take place there, I’m suffering a sense of boredom with these environments.

They are too familiar, too ‘normal’, and just not escapist enough. I’m not impressed anymore with the same rectangular tall buildings and the same ‘street cool’ culture as you also see in most movies and tv shows, even if you don’t live there to see it for yourself. While playing around in a familiar environment can make you relate better perhaps (and North Americans account for most gamers), and while gameplay should be the most important element, I don’t see why most of these games have to be set in these repetitive places. More pics and vids after the jump:

There have been exceptions of course; the Getaway was in London, which was refreshing and Midtown Madness 3’s driving around Paris was fun. Perhaps the biggest example of a driving open world game set outside America (as well as in one American city, Miami) is Driv3r, which may go some way to explaining why there haven’t been more games that have done so.

Dive3r was an abysmal game to play, but if you just drove around the Nice area of the French Riviera or Istanbul, Turkey, it was a remarkable achievement. I haven’t been to Istanbul, but the French Riviera was quite accurate. The game’s panning from the press and gamers alike may have led other game-makers to shy away from using other non-American cities, after all the next Driver game, Parallel Lines, took place in (sigh) New York, but it was only the poor gameplay and high expectations that destroyed Driv3r. It simply didn’t deliver a fun game, but there was nothing wrong with the interesting locations.

Now Vin Diesel and Midway are taking the risk again, and I hope they pull it off. Barcelona is an ideal city for this sort of game. Full of magnificent modern and ancient architecture and streets that range from wide treed boulevards to narrow medieval alleys, it has the diversity and character to be a perfect backdrop for a car chasing, gun fighting, action-packed open world game. If you are still doubtful about the location and style watch the fantastic (though now dated) car chases and action in the movie Ronin or even the newer Bourne films.

The Wheelman will be a “living breathing open-world Barcelona”, which is marketing-speak for the fact that it will have a sandbox city you can explore with or without your car, lots of pedestrians, and a traffic system that differs based on time of day. It will be more story-driven than most of these types of games but will have plenty of side missions and freedom.

The aim is for the game to have a lot of cinematic moments as in car-chase movies, after all Vin Diesel is known in his films to either be driving insanely fast through city streets or holding a gun, in some cases both. Gameplay mechanics to encourage this feel will be the car move called ‘the cyclone’, where you spin your car 180 degrees and start shooting through the windscreen from inside the driver’s seat at cars behind you, or the ‘vehicle melee’ where you slam into other cars that will lead to accidents that then create obstacles for others.

There will be on foot sections and plenty of gun-fighting as you play a lead protagonist who is a perfect likeness of Vin Diesel and his shiny bald head. Of course bank heists and cop chases are par for the course in gaming but with a city this dynamic there will be plenty of exploration that can be done, like a sort of virtual tourism perhaps?

Only time will tell if this promising game successfully brings the genre to a new location and makes for a complete and fun gaming package, but so far it is looking like those involved with the game are passionate enough. The game has been floating under the radar nicely since 2006 to hopefully surprise when it is released later this year and apparently there is also a Wheelman film in the works which covers events after the game. Now where did I put that copy of PGR 2 so I can brush up on my driving in Barcelona….

©2008 David Hilton

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Video Library: Courtesy of GameSpot.

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