DRIV3R review (Xbox)

Tanner is back, working undercover again. This time he has to bring down a multinational drug smuggling ring. And, as usual, the police don't know he's undercover and will take several pot shots at him and try to run him off the road. Antagonise the police enough and they'll even call in government agents.

As usual, you start off small, doing little jobs, taking the place of a small time crook you've apprehended to get your foot in the door of organised crime. This crime is controlled by a rather lovely looking lady, voiced by Hollywood actress Michelle Rodriguez. And very sultry she sounds too. The cut scenes are excellent, with high quality visuals and excellent sound. You character is voiced by Michael Madsen and other characters are also voiced by well known actors, including Ving Rhames of Mission: Impossible and Pulp Fiction fame.

Hollywood gets involved

As with Driver 2 there are sections on foot, involving shooting and finding your way through buildings. You get a reticule on the screen that controls where you shoot and you can turn on a limited auto aim in the options. I also had to invert the aim stick as it (to me anyway) was upside down, but this is a minor issue. A small problem came to my attention within a few minutes of playing the game, in that when an enemy was stood behind a knee high wall, I couldn't shoot them, and the cross hair wouldn't turn red, indicating a lock. He, of course, proceeded to fill me with lead and I had to move to get a clear shot, without the low wall in front of me. I hoped this wouldn't be a sign of things to come. As it turns out, it was, but I'll come to that later.

Signs?

Once the on foot stage has been completed, it's back into the usual Driver mode of driving and just as before it the usual American style of squealing tyres and tail out action a plenty. In some ways the cars have too much oversteer and it's often hard to keep up with your bad guy without fishtailing your way down the road and losing the person you were supposed to be tailing. This also rears its head when it turns out all the bad guys vehicles seem to be on rails and the game starts throwing obstacles in your way, seemingly at random, and placed in such a way that you can't avoid them. For instance lampposts, which are solid and will stop your car in its tracks, seem to appear at random and usually in a position that unless you slow down to a crawl, you can't avoid hitting them, totalling your car and having to restart the mission. This also means that the game is totally linear in undercover mode, in that there's no choice of mission, it's this one or choose another mode.

I've managed to get through the Nice and Miami missions with some difficulty, and many crashes, often seemingly through no fault of your own (cars turning into your path for no reason, the bad guys’ cars squeezing through the tiniest gaps, which then get smaller when you get there, etc.) only to be stuck on one of the later Istanbul missions for days now. Again, it's chase the bad guy (well, girl in this case), but she always loses me in the back streets full of tight turns, which are near impossible for you to corner but which seems to take as if her car was on rails. I eventually gave up after what must be over 300 attempts. Since I last played the game three days or so ago I haven't picked the joypad up at all.

Driv3l or sup3rb?

So what went wrong? Well, the game is full of bugs (the PS2 version even more so from what I've read) and is clearly in an unfinished state. I suspect Atari pressurised Reflections into sticking to the release date and in this case it's backfired spectacularly on Atari. One look at Metacritic.com, which includes Boomtown's marks in it's rankings, show you what a monumental disaster this will be (or at least should be) for Atari. The graphics are shoddy, full of slowdown when there's a lot going on and the textures pop into place when you're driving along, probably another compromise in graphical quality to try and keep a decent frame rate. Lampposts are impossible to make out until they're right on top of you, and thus impossible to avoid, and the whole game becomes an exercise in repetitive actions as you restart mission after mission in the vain hope that something different might happen that gives you the break you need to complete it, only to be frustrated a few mission later by the insane difficulty level.

It tries so hard to be a GTA beater

Also, the difficulty isn't even linear, some missions are very easy to complete, only to come across an impossible mission that takes hours of repetition to complete. I've even played a mission where the enemies change from one time to the next. When I first tried the forklift one I decided to jump into the water. I died later on land, so I dived into the water again next time, only to be met by two boats with gunmen on them? They weren't there before!!

On the whole, the extremely variable difficulty level, the bugs, the graphical pop-up that makes the driving so infuriating and the overall poor standard of the on-foot missions mean that this is, unfortunately, Driv3l. A poor, poor showing by Reflections and Atari. It tries so desperately to better GTA, but in fact True Crime: Streets of LA is better than this rubbish. Unless you're really, really sick of Grand Theft Auto, buy that instead!