DRIV3R

There was Grand Theft Auto, and then there was Driver. In 1999, Atari first introduced its driving-based crime series that today is known as the best competition Grand Theft Auto has ever seen. After meeting critical success with its first entry into the foray, the series was disappointingly met with failure in the sequel that followed. That was four years ago. Four years later, developer Reflections Interactive is back dressed in their stomping boots, and putting their feet down on the gas pedal. We have impressions with hands-on time with the game, as next month, the oddly named DRIV3R will after countless delays, set forth on the open road.

One part of his job is being an undercover cop. The other part is being a professional wheelman. Together, this makes Tanner, Driver's ruthless police officer, a force to be reckoned with. Like in the previous Driver entries, players will take on the role of Tanner, the cop/wheelman combo, to do what else? Chase the bad guys. On the case of a world-wide-car-smuggling-ring, Tanner is specifically after an elusive buyer of 40 various high-performance vehicles. Stopping at nothing, Tanner is intent on breaking up this circle of criminal masterminds the easy way, or the hard way.

Driver's not a Grand Theft Auto per se. What lies in Grand Theft Auto an open-ended environment you can plod around in to get to mission areas, the formula for Driver has always been a more linear experience. Rather than come to the mission, the mission comes to you. If that's the way fans of the series have liked it all these years, then they'll be happy to know that DRIV3R's schematics have remained relatively unchanged from past Driver experiences. DRIV3R will ultimately offer three available gameplay modes: Undercover, take a ride, and driving games. With undercover acting as a story mode (with 30 missions in all) and take a ride pushing you into a "free-ride" environment that lets players roam around the game's cities freely, the inclusion of driving games is a collection of driving-based mini-games staged in either of DRIV3R's three locations: Miami, Florida; Nice, France; and Istanbul, Turkey.

Throughout the game's playable missions, what was first experienced in the initial area led to tailing a police vehicle after hopping into a nearby one yourself. Once in motion, using a map on the HUD displayed a color marker where the police officer's vehicle was positioned in relation to your own location. That, with an orange arrow hovering in real-time above the officer's vehicle, helped to track his every move. Deviating off the course too long (usually crashing caused this) failed the mission. The objective after this one offered a similar following. After watching a brief and detailed cut scene, the directive was to find the entry point to a criminal's location. Disposing of a few armed thugs with a pistol in third-person mode, an in-game cut scene entailed showing the criminal hightail it out of a parking lot. Speeding off in his own vehicle, another driving mission pursued leading into another winding city chase -- just your car and his. Other than driving missions though, DRIV3R will also have its share of third-person shooting segments (like the one mentioned just before), with Tanner able to equip shotguns, automatics, and a grenade launcher for supreme destructive measure.

But for the most part, driving will be the primary portion of DRIV3R (after all, the game is called DRIV3R). Even though the driving missions available were strangely reminiscent of what was seen in the earlier Driver games, one of the biggest issues that's now been touched on (for the better, the MUCH better) is that the game's control scheme no longer feels like you're piloting a cruise ship. Feeling looser than in Driver 2, the car controls for DRIV3R actually feel closer to getting behind the wheel of a real car. However, like a real car, there will be problems present. Awkward in a way, DRIV3R isn't an arcadey game you'll be able to jump into from the get-go. Turning the car sharply has nasty sliding effects. Crashing into stuff here is also almost always a certainty that in 90% of the time, poles, trees, bushes, and buildings will surround the game's inner metropolis and cause you to wreck on contact. Bump into one, and returning to the mission in hand ultimately becomes a slow process because of this dilemma.

Outside the off-scale control issue, the most obvious change for DRIV3R lies in its new look. Stepping up from a 32-bit release from four years ago, the game has definitely come a long way in terms of technology. However, that doesn't say too much for the series' return as DRIV3R formulates a plain quality through and through. The kind of evolutionary polish given to a game like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City isn't here. Here, everything appears toned down on a much smaller scale. There are not hundreds of individual NPCs crowding sidewalks. There are not overly rich textures that develop and enhance the roads, the cars, the buildings, etc. There isn't even much to be said about the simple lighting effects -- a crucial aspect that effectively gave a much needed authenticity to Vice City's city. Even tolerable enough, DRIV3R's visual persona at present isn't developing at a stage most gamers' are going to want to gawk at. Hopefully, Reflections is hard at work on improving on this presently diminished aspect.