Driv3r
Spell it however you want, this dead horse series is officially beat3n.
Published: July 24, 2004
I don't really know what happened to Reflections Software. The house that Destruction Derby built not only fell from grace after kicking out one of the finest mixes of 70's whackadoo funk and powerslide-happy muscle car themes ever seen in video games. Driver was, simply put, a masterpiece, but something happened after the first game. Driver 2 tried to expand on original's gameplay by introducing on-foot action to spice things up. Problem was, the controls were clunky, Tanner – the game's eponymous hero – looked like a re-re, stutter-stepping around a world not meant to be explored by human feet.
It was also buggy as all hell, something that most hoped wouldn't be repeated with the third iteration. Sadly, even with the months of delays, Driv3r never managed to break out of the buggy, unfinished slump the series dipped into after the first game. Sure, it looks pretty as hell (we can thank the only bright side of the Stuntman engine for that), and when you're in a car, it generally performs exactly as it should. The problem is, there more of an emphasis than ever on doing things on foot, and that's where an otherwise decent car chase simulation falls apart.
But we'll get to that in a bit. For now, we'll start with your motivation. This time around, it's (surprise, surprise) all about cars -- specifically, 40 or so of the most expensive four-wheeled beast machines available in the world that tip the scales at about $20 million for the whole lot. With carjacking on this scale, it piques the interest of series wheelman Tanner (this time the unimonikered's pipes donated by Michael Madsen) and his gung-ho anti-badguy pro-undercover jones. He jets off to Miami to worm his way into the car boosting racket lead by Calita (voiced with typical monotone tough girl delivery by Michelle Rodriquez), with partner Tobias Jones (tackled by Ving Rhames) tagging along as the quasi-voice-of-reason.
The story as it stands is as good as the series has seen, serving to catalyze the scene changes from one environment to the next just as you get tired of zipping along the streets of one particular area. Most the missions will put you behind the wheel, where you belong, and where the game works best, but smatterings of rail shooter-type events and on-foot shooting events that serve to break up the action a bit. It's a novel try, and had the game had another half year or so of tuning, particularly in the on-foot sequences that didn't seem touched from the second game – it may have worked out.
The rail shooter events are evilly fun, allowing you to bust out a grenade launcher that allows for the most succinct way to hammer into any gamer's head that Reflections has included a damn fine physics engine – just don't try to have any fun with it for anything but blowing shit up; hitting the randomly placed jump opportunities in the game suddenly loses the "woo-hooooooo!" factor once you launch off it and immediately start pitching to the side, only to lose your ride.
It's the on-foot action that shows how busted the game really is. Aside from all the disgusting clipping issues (just about any part of any model's body can poke through any wall with reckless abandon), the lack of animation tweening -- hell of any real animation at all, the on-foot game is just plain crap, plain and simple. Tanner will often pop from one canned animation to the next, even moving a couple feet when doing it; there's nothing more embarrassingly hilarious than watching your lead character go levitating across pavement for 100 feet after getting hit by a car while stuck in a laying down frame of animation, then popping to his feet in a single frame, only to crumple to the ground. You can use the auto-aim feature to take out enemies with a pixel or two exposed, (and they, apparently, you). You can unload an entire clip into an enemy, then watch them die, suddenly pop up, then die again (y'know, just for that extra satisfaction, apparently), or, if you're really, really lucky, you'll watch them just kinda hang in space for a while, then pop up onto some random object and then die. It's as disgusting as as it is accidentally amusing, which is PLENTY, trust me.
It's a same, too, because I could go on for literally hours about how bad the game is on foot, but the driving game and the overall presentation of the game just freaking rocks. The Driver games always were conceived as a recreation of classic chase scenes, and while I'll always lament the loss of the glory days of the first game where a 70's funk guitar wail played as I watch cops sail over my head at the crest of a San Francisco hilltop, Driv3r does an amazing job of presenting things. The engine, which we'll get to along with the pre-rendered cinematics, is so obviously made for this kind of game, and lifted from the disgustingly difficult Stuntman restraints and allowed to settle into a world rife with opportunities to work that Stunt Director mode that lets you really show off all the cool moments you've just busted out, it really comes into its own.
That's not to say the visuals are perfect; stuttering framerates, the aforementioned animation problems, and some randomly disconcerting popup take you out of the game, but there is no single game that can replicate the amount of detail and scale of a massive city while kicking out the amount of deformation and complexity on cars. Period. The number of ways your car can get the holy living crap beat out of it are amazing (blowing up into preset chunks is another story, but I won't fault Reflections too much after all they did to present the rest of the car up until that point), from shattered to shot-out windows to car tires blowing out, to the amount of bullet-hole decals you can paint across a car with a well-loaded rifle before it finally does blow into those pre-chunked bits is stunning.
Audio-wise, there's little here that's cringe-inducing, but somehow the soundtrack just doesn't come close to capturing the flavor of the first game. It's good, sure, with voice acting bits that at the very least get the job done with minimal fuss (things seem rather subdued for all the players, so there's little opportunity to hear anyone voice any serious emotion beyond a line or two from Ving Rhames), and music that still retains the funk flavor, complete with a few licensed tracks from artists like Iggy Pop (who also lends his voice to a character for a few choice snippets) and Phantom Planet, as well as a handful of lesser-known acts that add startlingly perfect soundtracks to the pre-rendered sequences, especially the largely ambient track at the beginning of the game from appropriately-named mellowdrone.
The requisite tire squeals, sickening crunches of metal on metal, and engine noises are all top-notch, helping further point out that the car-based game is about as tuned as the series has ever been, but some of the pistol shots and even some of the rifles and semi-auto guns sound a little flat. Luckily, there's something as infinitely satisfying aurally to just unloading your entire clip into a car and hearing the tires blow, the windows shatter, and the PANK PANK PANK of bullets tearing through a car as there is to just watching it.
Driv3r is a classic example of a game that needed more time, but moreover, it needed some serious intervention from outside either Reflections, Atari or, most likely, both, to resurrect a game that was in some areas fundamentally flawed. Some of the clipping or popping errors in the game are so egregious that there's no way one party can be held solely at fault. This was a concerted effort to release a crap game that had so, so much more potential that the teeny bit Reflections and Atari were able to wring out of it.
Instead of being treated to a game as polished in all areas as the driving and pre-rendered cutscenes, gamers are instead fed those quality bits in between moments of seesawing difficulty, stuttery (or just plain missing) animation and clunky on-foot controls. There is some fun to be had here, but buying this game frankly just reinforces the practice of kicking out a game that is just plain NOT DONE. Rent it, sure, but tossing $50 at this pile is just a waste.
It was also buggy as all hell, something that most hoped wouldn't be repeated with the third iteration. Sadly, even with the months of delays, Driv3r never managed to break out of the buggy, unfinished slump the series dipped into after the first game. Sure, it looks pretty as hell (we can thank the only bright side of the Stuntman engine for that), and when you're in a car, it generally performs exactly as it should. The problem is, there more of an emphasis than ever on doing things on foot, and that's where an otherwise decent car chase simulation falls apart.
But we'll get to that in a bit. For now, we'll start with your motivation. This time around, it's (surprise, surprise) all about cars -- specifically, 40 or so of the most expensive four-wheeled beast machines available in the world that tip the scales at about $20 million for the whole lot. With carjacking on this scale, it piques the interest of series wheelman Tanner (this time the unimonikered's pipes donated by Michael Madsen) and his gung-ho anti-badguy pro-undercover jones. He jets off to Miami to worm his way into the car boosting racket lead by Calita (voiced with typical monotone tough girl delivery by Michelle Rodriquez), with partner Tobias Jones (tackled by Ving Rhames) tagging along as the quasi-voice-of-reason.
The story as it stands is as good as the series has seen, serving to catalyze the scene changes from one environment to the next just as you get tired of zipping along the streets of one particular area. Most the missions will put you behind the wheel, where you belong, and where the game works best, but smatterings of rail shooter-type events and on-foot shooting events that serve to break up the action a bit. It's a novel try, and had the game had another half year or so of tuning, particularly in the on-foot sequences that didn't seem touched from the second game – it may have worked out.
The rail shooter events are evilly fun, allowing you to bust out a grenade launcher that allows for the most succinct way to hammer into any gamer's head that Reflections has included a damn fine physics engine – just don't try to have any fun with it for anything but blowing shit up; hitting the randomly placed jump opportunities in the game suddenly loses the "woo-hooooooo!" factor once you launch off it and immediately start pitching to the side, only to lose your ride.
It's the on-foot action that shows how busted the game really is. Aside from all the disgusting clipping issues (just about any part of any model's body can poke through any wall with reckless abandon), the lack of animation tweening -- hell of any real animation at all, the on-foot game is just plain crap, plain and simple. Tanner will often pop from one canned animation to the next, even moving a couple feet when doing it; there's nothing more embarrassingly hilarious than watching your lead character go levitating across pavement for 100 feet after getting hit by a car while stuck in a laying down frame of animation, then popping to his feet in a single frame, only to crumple to the ground. You can use the auto-aim feature to take out enemies with a pixel or two exposed, (and they, apparently, you). You can unload an entire clip into an enemy, then watch them die, suddenly pop up, then die again (y'know, just for that extra satisfaction, apparently), or, if you're really, really lucky, you'll watch them just kinda hang in space for a while, then pop up onto some random object and then die. It's as disgusting as as it is accidentally amusing, which is PLENTY, trust me.
It's a same, too, because I could go on for literally hours about how bad the game is on foot, but the driving game and the overall presentation of the game just freaking rocks. The Driver games always were conceived as a recreation of classic chase scenes, and while I'll always lament the loss of the glory days of the first game where a 70's funk guitar wail played as I watch cops sail over my head at the crest of a San Francisco hilltop, Driv3r does an amazing job of presenting things. The engine, which we'll get to along with the pre-rendered cinematics, is so obviously made for this kind of game, and lifted from the disgustingly difficult Stuntman restraints and allowed to settle into a world rife with opportunities to work that Stunt Director mode that lets you really show off all the cool moments you've just busted out, it really comes into its own.
That's not to say the visuals are perfect; stuttering framerates, the aforementioned animation problems, and some randomly disconcerting popup take you out of the game, but there is no single game that can replicate the amount of detail and scale of a massive city while kicking out the amount of deformation and complexity on cars. Period. The number of ways your car can get the holy living crap beat out of it are amazing (blowing up into preset chunks is another story, but I won't fault Reflections too much after all they did to present the rest of the car up until that point), from shattered to shot-out windows to car tires blowing out, to the amount of bullet-hole decals you can paint across a car with a well-loaded rifle before it finally does blow into those pre-chunked bits is stunning.
Audio-wise, there's little here that's cringe-inducing, but somehow the soundtrack just doesn't come close to capturing the flavor of the first game. It's good, sure, with voice acting bits that at the very least get the job done with minimal fuss (things seem rather subdued for all the players, so there's little opportunity to hear anyone voice any serious emotion beyond a line or two from Ving Rhames), and music that still retains the funk flavor, complete with a few licensed tracks from artists like Iggy Pop (who also lends his voice to a character for a few choice snippets) and Phantom Planet, as well as a handful of lesser-known acts that add startlingly perfect soundtracks to the pre-rendered sequences, especially the largely ambient track at the beginning of the game from appropriately-named mellowdrone.
The requisite tire squeals, sickening crunches of metal on metal, and engine noises are all top-notch, helping further point out that the car-based game is about as tuned as the series has ever been, but some of the pistol shots and even some of the rifles and semi-auto guns sound a little flat. Luckily, there's something as infinitely satisfying aurally to just unloading your entire clip into a car and hearing the tires blow, the windows shatter, and the PANK PANK PANK of bullets tearing through a car as there is to just watching it.
Driv3r is a classic example of a game that needed more time, but moreover, it needed some serious intervention from outside either Reflections, Atari or, most likely, both, to resurrect a game that was in some areas fundamentally flawed. Some of the clipping or popping errors in the game are so egregious that there's no way one party can be held solely at fault. This was a concerted effort to release a crap game that had so, so much more potential that the teeny bit Reflections and Atari were able to wring out of it.
Instead of being treated to a game as polished in all areas as the driving and pre-rendered cutscenes, gamers are instead fed those quality bits in between moments of seesawing difficulty, stuttery (or just plain missing) animation and clunky on-foot controls. There is some fun to be had here, but buying this game frankly just reinforces the practice of kicking out a game that is just plain NOT DONE. Rent it, sure, but tossing $50 at this pile is just a waste.
