Wheelman is what would happen if Grand Theft Auto knocked up Burnout. Here you have an open world video game that lets you drive a series of cars, but also step out and blast enemies with an assortment of weapons. Oh, and it stars Vin Diesel, who does an excellent job making all of GTA's antiheroes look like pansies.

As its title suggests, you play as a wheelman, assigned to protect various people from evil. To do this, you must escort them to safety by any means necessary, whether that involves a friendly drive through of Barcelona, Spain, or furiously barreling down the city's streets and slaughtering hundreds of evildoers. And if that isn't intense enough, the police have a nasty habit of trying to pull you over, and you should respond accordingly by slamming into their barricades and slide-swiping them into buildings.

Even with months to go before its fall release, Wheelman is, dare we say it, fast and furious. Your muscle car flies through the city leaving destruction in its wake, and Midway's done a cool job with vehicle combat, as you're able to perform a move called the Cyclone that causes your car to spin around in slow motion, allowing you to take aim and blast enemies trailing you, even while you move backwards. So, it's basically the same old slow motion, bullet time effect we've seen for years, but with a neat spin that makes it somewhat unique.

In addition to playing chauffeur, you can also get out of your car and roam around. Wheelman doesn't appear to have the depth of GTA. Vin's not going to sleep with hookers and take drugs, but it's good to know that we can take a break from driving to shoot enemies on foot.

Midway claims to have created a living, breathing Barcelona. We've never visited the city, so we can't comment on how accurate it mirrors the real thing, but traffic and pedestrians operate independently and react to your driving misadventures by swerving and running for cover. With this kind of heat on your tail, however, you should expect to run over countless innocents. It's all in a day's work.

The challenge for the game's developers is to convince us that we should stop playing GTA IV and Burnout and give Wheelman a chance. Vin Diesel is a good reason, but we need compelling gameplay, the type of high-octane stuff that'll keep us up late, trying to complete one last mission. Hopefully, Midway rolls it out at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in July, and we'll get a better handle on what being a wheelman is all about.