OK…I know this game has been out for a while now, but I had recently just gotten around to playing it.

After seemingly vanishing from entertainment after the disaster that was “The Pacifier,” Diesel has been popping up with the redone and extended game “Escape from Butcher Bay” newly titled “Dark Athena”, The new “Fast and Furious” movie, and now he’s playing a driver in Wheelman. It’s a game that I wanted to love; the concept shouldn’t have worked, but Diesel has just enough anti-Hero charm that it could have turned out to be a fun title. Unfortunately, all of that charm is completely overshadowed by clunky execution at just about every turn.

While your character may have the likeness and voice of Diesel, you’ll be spending your time in Wheelman as Milo Burik, the persona you take on to go undercover as a wheelman to criminal organizations in Barcelona. A man in a suit explains to you at the start that there’s some sort of incredibly dangerous item on the loose in Barcelona, and it’s up to you to get it. You’ll also get some occasional hints via in-game e-mails that you’re on the right side of the law, and that’s about as much of the story as you’re going to get.

Video games are often knocked for having weak writing when compared to almost every other form of media, and Wheelman is really a perfect example of this. When I say that a story is “difficult to follow,” that means it wasn’t a very interesting story, so keeping track of it can be tough, since I don’t really care. The story in Wheelman is impossible to follow. I really tried to figure out what was going on in the game, and while some missions have very obvious connections to the others, I was never able to figure out what was going on in the main story.

An extreme example was a mission that didn’t have any lead-in. There weren’t any cut scenes to vaguely explain the situation to me beforehand, so when I started the mission, I was given a text prompt that told me, “The tube is at the construction site,” and I needed to get it. When I got there, a three-way gang war going on, and no one was on my side. Everybody wanted this cardboard tube, and I had absolutely no idea why.
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