The Road to Recovery
The Driver franchise is slowly bouncing back, but this stripped down PSP version isn't helping a whole lot.
Published: May 10, 2007
Some of the other gripes I have can't be explained away quite so easily. None of the weapons in the game have any real oomph to them -- so much so that you can actually unload a full clip into someone and maybe they'll go down -- the lack of a sprint or jump button means that all you can really do on foot is mash the shoulder buttons to lock on and unload on someone, but again, if you manage to pull in some heat (and like Parallel Lines, you can attract attention both as a ped or in a car, but there's really no need to ditch a car and cool the heat since you can just outrun them most of the time).
Luckily, at least the game knows where its strengths lie, and that's decidedly not on foot. Once you're behind the wheel, there's plenty to do, including side races, robberies, carjackings and so on, though just opting to screw around in the city is the most fun if you only have a few minutes. Scattered everywhere (usually right in the middle of the arc you'd take if you screamed off that construction site's half-built building onto those shipping containers) are stars that provide the collectable aspect of the game and reward you with useless little baubles and trinkets like clothing and accessories, but because you don't really see them reflected in game, they're simply good for trading wirelessly with another player. Yes, it's lame.
So too is the general feel of the game. Sumo Digital are not unfamiliar with the ways of the PSP racer, having done more than a few ports of everything from sims like Race Driver 2006 to pure arcade efforts like Outrun 2006, and though the handling and general weight of the cars is nice and varied, actually adding anything to them like better engines or shocks doesn't really shift that too much, which is a shame. The mass of loading at the front of any mission or even while cruising is also a bit of a mystery given just how lifeless most of the city actually is. There's little foot traffic, the streets are usually pretty devoid of other cars, and the textures, while varied enough, tend to have that familiar low-res, super-stretched look that a lot of PSP games are suffering from these days.
I got a little excited when I heard that Driver '76 was going to be rocking a funk soundtrack, but as it turns out, a lot of the music eking out of the PSP's speakers is licensed stuff. It's good licensed stuff, stuff like War and James Brown, and if that sounds familiar, it's probably because these were the same songs heard in Parallel Lines. No whacka-dooing guitars to complement my high-speed getaways, but hey, they're over in seconds anyway. The voice acting carries the clichés of the characters well enough, but they never really elicit any actual convincing emotion.
Thanks to a host of little problems here and there, Driver's first PSP outing is, sadly, about on par with the stuff seen pre-Parallel Lines. Though it leans more toward the original game in flavor and fun factor, there's still enough taint from the failed sequels permeating the game from engine on down that it feels like another stumble rather than a continued rise out of the slump the franchise had fallen into. Fun? Sure, powersliding a muscle car around a corner and counter-steering juuuuust out of a fishtail always will be, it's just a shame that there's all this other crap pulling the rest of the experience down.
