Aside from the story missions where your ultimate goal is to apprehend Jericho, the city is peppered with side missions, of the sort you’d expect; races through checkpoints, collect-a-thons, stunt driving and crashes. It’s raison d’être, using these missions types, is to recreate or re-experience many vintage Hollywood car scenes from screen gems like Bullit, The French Connection, The Driver and The Italian Job et al. You’ll find yourself doing things like shifting in to the body of a learner driver, and using your acquired skills, scaring the life out of the driving instructor; or making a car salesman wish he’d never booked out that fast little sports car for a test-drive. Scenes like this, with their droll dialogue, inject a fair bit of humour and silliness in to a title that might otherwise be stiffly stone-faced.
The quantum-leap inspired shift mechanic, at surface, to be a hokey gimmick – but it does open up some rather intriguing gameplay possibilities. You could, for instance, when being chased by the hard-to-shake cops shift in to an oncoming car and drive it head-first in to your pursuers, making your getaway just a little easier. As your shifting prowess grows, you’re able to eventually zoom out to a Google maps-like view, giving you instant access to cars across the breadth of the entire city – and this is where the game is really impressive. It all runs at a steady and smooth 60fps, with nary a loading screen in sight. Sure, the instant-streaming and silky smooth frame rate may come at a slight graphical penalty – but this is a game about driving past the scenery really, really fast, not counting the polygons that make up the street poles.
As somebody who doesn’t exactly appreciate vehicle-based games, I walked in expecting to hate it, and left pleasantly surprised. If Ubisoft Reflections has managed to keep the narrative as compelling throughout the game (they’re promising twists, turns and surprises) and has also kept the game from feeling repetitive, they could just have a winner on their hands – and it might even be enough to bring back the shine to the tarnished Driver franchise.
Game previewed on PS3
Driver: San Francisco will be available for Mac, PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on September 2 this year, with a separate Wii version – serving as a prologue – available on the same day.
Last Updated: May 9, 2011
