Bad arcade driving in a game requiring finess, ensures Wheelman flys far wide of the mark for both sim & arcade fans
Wheelman's driving model is not just bad but actually seems to have everything backwards. Instead of making the driving easier which, theoretically, arcade racers are supposed to do, Wheelman's driving model instead serves to make the game much more difficult through it's topsy turvy configuration, which is a real handicap for a game that requires (and deserves) a lot more precision in order to make it work.
What makes it such an awful game is not the driving model being just too arcade but rather that the driving model's dynamics feel like such a hodge podge of disparate and unusual effects that the cars seem to defy physics in order to do the opposite of what you expect them to. The most obvious example being the break trigger causing you to slide as though you pulled the emergency break instead of giving you traction. It's full of other seemingly unexplainable inconsistencies, such as sports coupes that barely out-pace tiny mini fiats, performance motor cycles that accelerate like clapped out junkers and which have trouble keeping up with armoured security trucks, and police cars with so much weight to them you'd think they had tank engines pushing chassis made of lead.
The overall affect is the feeling of a kind of distorted reality where the laws of physics are not just bent but totally broken and in some cases reversed and where whatever frame of reference you might have brought from previous driving games is so bent out of shape that it can't really offer you any help with Wheelman beyond outlining what you're not to do.
At this stage of the game, where a great many of us have been moving from driving simulation to driving simulation for at least a decade, assimilating the progressive developments as we go (the largest demographics for video games reportedly being the mid-thirties), and where open world driving games such as the Need for Speed series provide arcade racing that approximates simulation, making a game that forces you to break established habits to learn an entirely new and muddled physics model that just seems to hamper your efforts at the best of times just seems illogical and ridiculous.
You might ask why I'd take the time to write this review if I didn't like the game. The answer to that is that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference, and Wheelman is neither a game I love nor one that I feel indifferent towards. Instead I really wish that Wheelman had taken itself more seriously, since if it did so - giving us control of breaks and gears that really let the player lay down traction, accelerators that actually felt like you're putting your foot down when you hammer the trigger rather than just directing the virtual driver to pull away at his leisure and if the cars were a comparable weight to the police cruisers instead of feeling like go-carts in comparison - Wheelman could have been a game that even serious driving simulation fans could spend some time casually enjoying.