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Dom Robinson reviews
Atari 
- Price: £44.99
- Players: 1
- Widescreen: Yes
- 60Hz: No
- Dolby Digital 5.1 sound: Yes
- Xbox Live-enabled: Yes (not multiplayer)
The first thing that struck me about Driv3rwas that it contained great stuff to drive about like the GTA series, and, likewise, choosing your ownsoundtrack and vehicles, including flash race cars, speedboats, motorbikes, trucks and a bus! Sadly, Iwasn’t allowed to head straight into a lamp-post as that did tend to stop me. However, at least you canswim this time when you go in the water!
In addition, this game series has enjoyed a good reputation. Although I didn’t play the last game, Idid go headlong into the original Driver the PSX and hugely enjoyed careering up and down theSan Francisco hilly streets.
Looking at the basics here, the options begin with Driving games “Chase” and “Getaway”. These arefairly obvious – Just keep on the trail of the enemy, or escape from the cops, although in the former caseI don’t see why the enemy has to just slightly get out of distance before it’s game over. Hit one car onthe way and you’re stuck and it’s too late to catch up.
For Trailblazer, hit 100 cones before the short timer runs out (increasing every time you hit one), orbefore you car dies from a broken engine; In Survival, there’s a robbery in progress – and you’vejust done it! Try and escape the cops, before they smash you to pieces; Checkpoint Race is self-explanatory;and Gate Race is the same as Trailblazer, except you drive inbetween two cones acting as ‘gates’.
And then we’re into the game proper with the Undercover mode, playing as Tanner and starting off againstBaccus, and heading through the locations Miami, Nice and Istanbul (not Constantinople).
Graphics are nothing less than outstanding, and I like the way I can use the right-stick to viewall around me, which brightens up otherwise dull straight racing across the water to get to partof a level.
It’s a game that has far more fluid movement than the lacklustre and overhypedTrue Crime: Streets of L.A.when it comes to driving, but as you walk around your character does feel like he’s got some sort of medicalproblem because it’s rather stilted. In fact, run about and he definitely looks like he’s desperate fora laxative.
One disadvantage I noticed at this point – why can’t I crouch AND move at the same time?I want to move into position to shoot the baddies and it won’t let me. Also, as you crouch and turnaround, any walls behind you cover the 3rd-person camera and make it impossible to see what you’re doing.Some more intuitive behaivour could be incorporated as well, such as when I leap from a boat to the quay,I do NOT want to fall into the water. Ok, so unlike the GTA games, Tanner can actually swim, but it’san unwelcome ‘feature’ that could’ve been fixed.
In fact, it’s moving about in general when on foot that makes for completing the mission parts of thegame as a real pain and not a fun challenge. If I keep walking into a bar and getting murdered whileI’m trying to shoot everyone to complete that mission, just to fail most times by being hit whileturning round slightly to get an accurate shot, even even then the baddies aren’t trying to run away,then it’s a rather poor do.
Also, while there are no audio problems deviating from the driving/shooting SFX you expect,if I could change one thing soundwise, it’s that when choosing a soundtrack, I pick one of thealbums on the hard drive, and unlike, say,Midtown Madness 3orProject Gotham Racing 2,it doesn’t select a random track, it just starts from the beginning each time.
When it comes to the Xbox Live content, you can view other people’s gameclips but can’t playagainst others online, alas. I’ve created several gameclips already and uploaded them, althoughyou can’t search by type for downloading so the ones you make are bound to get lost amongst themall as the list online is sorted by ‘most recently uploaded’.
However, done right, you can achieve fantastic-lookingstunt clips, particularly by positioning a static camera anywhere, but the auto-director featurealso does a good job – and if you don’t like one of its angles, just change it.If I had two complaints, it would be a rewind button to go with the fast-forward,since if you just miss an angle you want to alter, you’ll have to go back to the start and FFWD tothe chosen moment, and also, you only get a rather short time to edit. Given that the Xbox has amassive hard drive, you should be allowed to edit clips for several minutes more.
All that said, and if you can get past the on-foot control problems, one thing this release reallyneeded was… Xbox Live online play. It’s not there, and that means there will be those who insteadgo for Midtown Madness 3.
When it comes to the driving, I think it’ll appeal to those who enjoyed Project Gotham Racing 2, but wantsomething with more of an arcade-like feel. The replay feature is a massive bonus, as is being able toupload them and see other people’s replays.
Just a few weeks after I put this review online originally, a lot ofheavy playing of this game has finally resulted in completion. Overall,while the driving scenes were outstanding, and ones from which the GTAseries could learn from when ‘San Andreas’ gets a release on the Xbox,the on-foot sections never stopped being a royal pain.
I thoroughly enjoyed playing Driv3r though, and while one of themost fun levels was Tanner Escapes (in Istanbul), requiring youto constantly fire grenades at approaching police cars and sending themflying in all kinds of directions, there was more of a challenge inall the sections of Booby Trap, involving driving a car that hadto be kept over 50mph (so, rather like the movie Speed, but atleast once you dropped below that limit you still had a second or two tospeed up to compensate for this.
Most annoying, though, were Rescue Dubois, one of the ‘chase’ levelsin which it was a real bastard to catch up with the car carrying Dubois andfor which it took forever, and then a very similar level in the last but twoventures, The Chase, when you had to catch Calita. It was justfucking impossible the way she tore round tight bends while you had a piece-of-shitcar to drive in, so I bit the bullet after several attempts and used the helpofGamefaqs.comto get past that stage, as well as judging my performance from thewalkthroughs.
I’ll look forward to the fourth installment and will keep playing the basicgame for kicks, but I hope they fix the walking sections so Tanner doesn’tlook like he’s wearing tight pants!
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.