If someone had taken GTA to Hollywood and asked them “what do you make of this?” I imagine their response would have been “Hey you know what? That Rusky guy Niko kinda looks like Vin Diesel don'tcha think?” - and so Wheelman was born. From some strange GTA meets TV Dinner Arny movie hybrid, Wheelman promises explosions, pure cheese and explosive pure cheese action. If I had a cheeseburger for every brightly lit, 3rd-person, poorly animated, flat textured, flat action, “ooh here's a super move you haven't seen” game that flops it's way into the hybrid genre because like a Tai Bride it's confused about where it's going in life – I'd be one fat bastard.

However, that said, after playing Vin Diesel Wheelman (grammatically that hurts for me to type, but it's on the bloody box that way, so sue me) I feel slightly dirty and out-of-place with my time spent on the game as in some respects, and saying this is no easy task – I actually quite enjoyed it. Sort of. In a round about way.

But still, that alone has somewhat impressed me.

Vin Diesel plays the part of Milo Burik an undercover agent trying to expose an international threat in Barcelona. A likely story. You're given the task of roaming the streets, working your way up the metaphorical crime syndicate food chain in order to take out the big wigs up top. Most of which you achieve by blowing crap up as much as possible, pulling of Hollywood-worthy car manoeuvres and always making sure you have the last word with a deep Diesel voiceover.

Fundamentally I'd say that Wheelman was driving game, and not least for it's obvious title. More so that the games main development time, and indeed what is probably the most “fun” part of this game, has been put into the driving elements, while the run-and-gun moments... not so much. They work, but as a sideline and variance to cutup the mighty plethora of driving based main and side missions.

Another show-and-tell example of this is what you can achieve in both situations. While driving, you get a sort of Focus mode which builds up the more you do stylish and dangerous moves – albeit what the game judges as dangerous, it would seem curved towards pulling off stunts that don't endanger the public, you are a cop after all. More importantly you can spend this build-up (erm... that didn't sound right) on activating cool-looking bullet-time stunts that can spin your car around 180 for you to take out the high-speed, high-octane, turbo-charged, turban wearing (what do you mean they're not wearing turbans? This is a game about international threats right? Surely they must have some kind of racist, cliché, stereotypical headscarf to wear? I live in the UK after all, where we have strict guidelines on who we can shoot from a highly classified hand-me-down document clearly stating what to look for in terrorists. One such item we know to exist on this list is a Rucksack, although skin colour might have had something to do with it.)... where was I... ah yes – terrorists. Or you can keep the car driving forward and pick your targets off at a distance, and finally you can spend it all on a crazy speed boost flinging any given car with some strange psychic Nitro power. If you don't have any Focus you can, it what might be silly but a bit of a laugh is ram your opponents car from the sides or rear. Finally, if shooting out your window, blowing your opponents car up just doesn't cut the mustard, you can sling-shot yourself from the car your in to his. Wow.

On foot you can shoot people... and get stuck on debris.

So yeah, as you can see the game's focus is pretty much on the driving and that's understandable. I suppose a gripe would either be how outrageously OTT the game is, or that there's a very John Woo feel to the way game presents your challenges. You can go and complete a bunch of side missions, but I never really felt the point. You get unlimited ammo with your pistol and that pretty much does the job. I can understand that a good reason to get a better weapon would be to dispatch the what seems never-ending supply of baddies that get flung in your direction, but at the same time I only rarely got bored of having these high-speed ram-raiding chases – and anyway, taking them out only gives you about 5 minutes respite before they chuck another 4 cars your way.

The game's buggy and simplistic which probably sets things up for a lot of people to get frustrated. I think one of the things that stands out the most for me is how much faster your enemies tend to be. You use your boost and an opponent keeps up with you or if you're not supposed to catch him at that point, he'll speed away faster than Bush at a peace conference. Others include weird collision, tepid AI and the ability to adsorb an alarming amount of bullets (thank you Vin).Even the map system that allows you to hop from one mission to another makes general city-roaming a pointless activity.

You will of course see this kind of behaviour in other games for sure, and Wheelman collectively smacks of other titles... but, well, I can't knock it as much as perhaps it would be sane for me to do so. Putting most of what you look for in a game aside and switching about 60-70% of your brain off and Wheelman ain't that bad.