DRIV3R

Atari is keen to assert that the split between driving and on-foot action in DRIV3R is approximately 80/20. This sounds perfectly acceptable in theory, but in practice, it is the central downfall of the entire game. The 20 percent that takes place on foot takes four times longer than it should because of countless design flaws. In brief: The driving parts are awesome, the running around sucks.

When I say that it sucks, I don��t just mean that it��s inferior compared with the car handling (which is just as fabulous as it was in the last two games)��I mean it really, really sucks. Hard. There are moments when you��re struggling through what should be a relatively simple on-foot section and the rage will boil up inside you in a way that it probably hasn��t for years. It��s not that it��s hard��it��s that the design is incompetent. Controlling Tanner is unnecessarily difficult, the logic of the missions is badly communicated, the A.I. comes packed with problems, and let��s face it��the game has some technology issues.

You want examples? A shootout in a boatyard sees the bad guys blindly running into your gunfire before you jump into a boat to chase after a midlevel thug in a powerboat. As with previous Drivers, if you lag behind, you lose the bad guy and have to restart the level. Keep up with him, and you eventually find yourself chasing him into a shack out in the water. As he moors his boat, he miraculously disappears to do whatever it is the game script has him doing next. As you pull up next to his boat, you turn to try to get out, but the lousy animation system won��t let you get out. So you jump the other way into the water and swim to a handy ladder. Pressing the button to pull yourself up and out of the drink, you suddenly find yourself teleported back into the boat for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, the bad guys are filling you with lead.

There are ways to avoid this problem, but you soon learn that to play DRIV3R is to face its quirks and bugs as much as it is to engage in the gameplay. Often, you��ll beat a mission only because you��ve learned to understand the dumb stuff that the scripting forces upon you. You��ll rarely beat a level the first time through, and not because it��s tough. The problem is that you��re forced into a perpetual sequence of trial and error that never lets up throughout the entire story mode.

Toward the end of the game, you follow your nemesis, Jericho, into a building where he��s cutting some kind of sinister deal. The plan is to sneak up on him and find out what he��s up to without letting his goons see you. If you mess up once, he runs out to his car with his driver, and they hurtle away. As any modern gamer would try at this point, you��ll attempt to limit his options. Instead of going into the building, you find his car and shoot at it until it explodes, and then you attempt the mission a little more recklessly. As soon as you��re seen, the script sends Jericho out to his car��which is now miraculously in one piece again.

You see, you only ever have the illusion of freedom in DRIV3R. Sometimes missions allow you to make your own rules, but often you are very sharply reigned back in by the linear nature of the design and the flaws that this causes.

What I��ve mentioned so far, of course, assumes that you��ll want to play through the ��undercover�� (story) mode of the game. After spending a great deal of time with the whole package, I��m here to tell you that you might not want to do that. Yes, you have to endure it to some degree in order to open up all of the game��s other features, but once those options are there, take them. The story is bad. It��s bloated, badly planned, misdirected, terribly scripted, awfully paced, and ultimately forgettable. Essentially it��s inconsequential to the action, and the performances of the voice actors are almost wholly without merit. Often, you don��t know what��s going on, nor do you care. Yes, the cut-scenes are lovely (although terribly serious and humorless), and the music is wonderful, but what��s most important are the car chases.

When you��re playing through the story, you��ll find yourself wishing that you could just play the car chases and not have to bother with all that tedious mucking about on foot. What luck! Quit out of the story and jump into either the driving games mode or the take-a-ride mode, and you��ll never have to leave the comfort of one of the game��s 70 controllable vehicles again. This is why the score at the end of this review isn��t as low as you would think, having read this far.

If you��ve played either of the previous games in the franchise, you��ll be familiar with some of the options in these modes. There are tests of skill, such as driving through cone slaloms; a survival mode in which the cops go frickin�� psycho on you; and multiple cat-and-mouse chase modes in which you��re either the cat or the mouse. To enjoy these modes to the fullest, you have to play through the Miami and Nice missions of the story mode so that you open Istanbul. But if you don��t really care whether Tanner kills Jericho at the end, I suggest you reward yourself for enduring the torture and throw yourself into the take-a-ride mode, in which you simply cruise around, smashing through scenery and stealing cars to your heart��s content.

I was conflicted the entire time I played this game. It��s desperately, desperately flawed, and if you aren��t prepared to wring every last drop of gameplay out of the entire package, you��re going to come away very disappointed. Much like with True Crime, though, part of the reward here is to make your own fun by ignoring the parameters set for you. Treat it as a gaming sandbox, and you may enjoy it.

Please Don��t Compare It to GTA

Much like the marketers at Activision charged with telling us about True Crime before it, the Atari promotion machine is exceptionally keen to distance DRIV3R from the Grand Theft Auto phenomenon. Fair enough. Big cities, criminal activities, a modicum of freedom, driving, shooting, voice actors, cool soundtrack��I can see why you wouldn��t want to confuse the two. It��s not like the two franchises have any similarities or anything. With this in mind, it does make you wonder why Reflections chose to include a minigame in which you have to defeat 10 ��Timmy Vermicellis�� to unlock goodies. Timmy, as you can see, even looks like Tommy from Vice City. If you don��t want us to think about GTA while playing DRIV3R, why would you do that?

PROS Excellent car handling, awesome car chases, detailed environments, wonderful production values

CONS Appalling on-foot gameplay, flawed missions, ghastly story

Pub. Atari Dev. Reflections ESRB Mature MSRP $49.99

Making Driver Movies

The moviemaking mode is in danger of being Reflections�� most predictable trick. It started in the original Driver and has appeared in every game since, including Stuntman, which was pretty much built around the idea. DRIV3R expands on it a little and allows you to add effects such as motion blur. Crank that up too far, though, and it��ll make you feel queasy. Piecing together beautifully directed car chases can be quite time-consuming but is ultimately a lot more rewarding than you might think. The interface is particularly easy to use, and a whole movie rarely requires more than 100K of memory card space, so you can crank out quite a few on a single card.

Driving Is Good

All the best bits of the game take place inside the cars. The on-foot stuff all pretty much sucks.

We Played Them for You

DRIVER

Undercover cop Tanner pitched his services as a driver-for-hire in order to infiltrate a powerful crime ring spanning four of the nation��s largest cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami. Driver featured lots of driving and no tedious running around shooting at stuff. It was one of the first games to make use of a physics engine for realistic bouncing around, and Reflections�� then-recent stint producing Destruction Derby games for Psygnosis meant that the crashes were particularly spectacular. It was a very ambitious game, and it even featured the replay director mode still present in the franchise today. It still stands as one of the great PlayStation games of all time.

DRIVER 2

Someone decided the franchise needed more of a story, so this time Tanner is up against crime lord Solomon Caine (who gets popped off at the beginning of DRIV3R by Mickey Rourke��s character) and his bookkeeper, Pink Lenny. Caine had cut a deal with his rival, Brazilian gangster Alvaro Vasquez, but this prompted a gang war across two continents. Gameplay took Tanner to Vegas, Rio, Chicago, and Havana, and it was in Driver 2 that we first met his partner Tobias Jones, who is voiced by Ving Rhames in DRIV3R. This game also took Tanner out of his car and introduced us to Reflections�� complete lack of skill in producing gameplay that doesn��t involve driving something.

$30 Million Buys You This

Four years of development time and about $30 million is what it took to bring a slightly misdirected action game to your PS2. By contrast, rumor has it that the budget for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is $20 million. Not that we��re comparing the two.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine.