grimjack2's Full Review: Driver: You Are The WheelMan for Windows
Something that most reviews of Driver never mention is that there was a movie of the same name that came out in 1978 which this game was obviously based on. Everyone keeps seeming to mention "Bullit" and "The French Connection", but I don't understand why no one seems to remember that great movie called "The Driver". It was almost Walter Hill's first directing job, and it had some of the best car chase scenes ever put onto film.
The video game Driver can almost be called a 3d version of Grand Theft Auto. It has a great feel to it. This isn't a car simulation, but an arcade game, but there is a great feeling of realism in a number of ways. With the help of the parking break, you can perform maneuvers like 360s, 270s, reverse 180s, etc.. You can perform burnouts, and even impacts are handled fairly realistically. When taking a sharp turn with your emergency break on a hill, you will hold your breath as you slowly flip over.
There are two portions of the game. A huge undercover mission portion, and then many smaller, quick games along the same variations as you'll see in the missions. You can run from cops, chase down another driver, play a cop after someone, or just cruise around town. There is also a race game where you want to knock down all 100 cones in a set time limit. These games are good, and you can play in each of the cities, and with any combination of weather, time of day, amount of cops and street traffic as you'd like.
The undercover mission portion of the game sounds straightforward, but it isn't. Basically you are an undercover cop who is collecting evidence by being a get-away driver for whomever wants to hire you. But wait! Don't think that this is simply one mission after another of trying to get from point A to point B while the cops try to stop you. One mission has put a passenger in your car and your job is to scare him within a certain time limit. There is even a humorous 'freak out' meter to represent how scared he is. Another mission has you chasing an elevated subway train trying to beat it to the station to intercept a bad guy. Another has you rescuing some guys from a shootout, and taking them to safety. One mission has you having to wreck a certain car bad enough, and then escape back home with the cops after you. One of the more unusual ones had me having to drive through four or five restaurant windows to teach the owner a lesson. Trying to back out of a restaurant with cops ramming you from behind can be rather difficult.
I especially enjoyed the final mission where I am trying to get the President of the United States to safety while Cops (!?) are trying to ram me. I would think they would be a little more gentle with the President's Limo than just trying to ram me into a telephone poll or something, but I guess I can't expect the programmers to custom design a final level. I really laughed how each time I failed at the mission by crashing, I would hear the president's voice say "I guess you didn't vote for me either."
All these missions take place in Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York. There are only these four maps the whole game, but they are huge. You actually get to know the city streets somewhat well after you've performed 10 or so missions in each one. In these cities, police cars are everywhere, and part of the programming seems to be that if you aren't near any, some will appear at the edges of your radar map. The instructions say that if you don't break the law, the cops won't notice you. The only law that matters if you break it, is speeding. Trust me! I drove on sidewalks to go around police cars, I've driven the wrong way directly at them slowly, and I've made people standing on grass scatter as I drove a few miles under the speed limit towards them. The cops were okay with all that, as long as I wasn't speeding. I don't know what the cops are like in England, where this game was developed, but I want to start driving there!
The sound was good, and I liked the constant rumbling of a big block engine under me, but I don't think it was in surround at all. And there is an awesome replay mode. You can actually edit, choose the camera angles, and save your favorite performances to your harddrive to show off to people later. This is a nice little bonus for budding directors, like me.
There are only a few complaints, but some are big ones. The starting mission, the tryout, is so hard that I almost never played the rest of the game! I must have tried to beat it two dozen times before I finally did it. You have to perform every trick in the book in a parking garage, under a short time limit.
Another complaint is that the cops are interchangable. I never felt like any of the enemies had different skill levels or anything. Same with the street drivers. A variation of skill level with the enemies could have extended the multiplayer possibility much more. Also, there are no curved roads. All the roads are grids. This wasn't a problem when playing it, but when pointed out to me afterwards, I sort of went "Oh Yeah...".
And, like most console ports, the save game feature isn't appropriate. You can only save games in-between completing every few missions. This wouldn't be too annoying if not for the fact that I wanted to save certain mission to show to friends.
And how come they haven't made Driver 2 for the computer market yet, when the console version has been out since Christmas??
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