Cast your mind back a few years, and one of the highlights of the Friday night telly was Life on Mars, and its follow up Ashes to Ashes on the BBC. Following Gene Hunt, the non-PC Policeman of the past, the series proved a hit nationwide with its tales of police drama in years gone by. Seemingly, it was quite a hit up in Newcastle too, where Driver: San Francisco's been developed, as the game has practically the same plot.
Rounding off the trifecta of recently released Driver games, joining the sweary, and a bit naff Driver: Renegade, and the awesome Driver: San Francisco on the Wii (which is actually an entirely different game, despite sharing the same name), comes, er, Driver: San Francisco, a game with the same name that's actually a completely different game, with a different story, different cars, and an entirely different gimmick for you to take control of.
Car transporters always seem to know the best places to park. Wheeeee!
Letting you learn on your feet, Driver: San Francisco drops you in straight at the deep end as John Tanner, in pursuit of a guy you've been trying to get behind bars for years called Charles Jericho. Just as you think you've got him cornered, things go horribly wrong, and you end up being hit by an 18 wheeler. It's here the similarities with Ashes to Ashes start to take place, as Tanner gets put in a coma, with the game you're playing taking place in his dreams. And while everything seems fairly normal to begin, soon Tanner begins to realise he has abilities he shouldn't really have - like the ability to float up into a sky, and take over another car, taking on the role of the driver without any of the passengers noticing...
It's this rather unique feature that sets Driver apart from other similar racing games. As you're playing as a cop, trying to bring Jericho down, you'll be working your way towards finding Jericho by tracking down and following the various members of his gang. Thanks to your ability to shift, of course, finding out information about Jericho's whereabouts is a lot easier than it would be, and as you progress through the story, you'll be using your shifting powers to make things go exactly as you want them to - helping Jericho's gang to escape from the police when it suits you, and chasing them down when it doesn't.
You can use this new feature, known as shift, at any time during a mission, and it certainly brings plenty of new ideas to the table - although most of them are variations on a theme of crashing. Taking part in a race, and don't want to rely on skill to win? Take over on coming traffic and make life that little bit harder for the other racers. Need to shake the cops? Take over a truck and pull it across the road behind you. Letting you use other traffic to your advantage, you can have a lot of fun on Driver: San Francisco just by shifting into other vehicles and seeing what mayhem you can wreak.
The game takes place in a massive recreation of San Francisco which you're free to explore as and when you see fit - although strangely, there's little reason to do so. While there are "movie tokens" scattered around the place, which, when you've collected enough, unlock missions that let you recreate famous car chases from films of yesteryears, but should you want to do a mission, or one of the "dares", which are little challenges you can attempt, it's quicker to jump into the shift view, and simply hop across all the traffic to the other end of town.
As you complete challenges, and drive around the city generally, you'll unlock cars that you can buy, and points that you can buy them with respectively. With a wide range of accurately modelled cars on offer, you can drive anything from a Fiat 500 through to a Jaguar XJ, and beyond, with a wide range of cars, from the super, to the not-so-super available to drive, each coming with an accurately modelled interior for maximum authenticity - although you're free to race in third person view, should you prefer. The cars certainly take a bit of getting used to when you first start driving them, though - large, heavy, and rather drift happy, the cars have seemingly been made so their back end flies out as soon as you turn a corner - presumably to make it more like how the cars handle in the great car chases - yet it's certainly an acquired taste. It really feels like you're driving a big, heavy car, with a lot of weight behind it - and that can mean a lot of spinning out at inopportune moments at first.
Even crazy Beetle/monster trucks make the cut.
There's plenty of variety to the vehicular mayhem you'll be asked to cause, though, with races, pursuit missions, where you've got to stay a certain distance behind a car, and standard criminal capturing ones, where you've just got to ram the bad guy off the road interspersed with some more challenging ones, such as one which asks you to drive a school bus to a certain point whilst keeping it going at more than a certain speed, as a reference to another famous film. Another repeating type of mission asks you to either race to a certain point without your passenger's heart rate dropping below a certain point, or to terrify your passenger so much, it pushes their heart beyond a certain point - which obviously call for two rather different styles of driving!
But it's not so much the variety of the missions as the dialogue that keeps Driver entertaining. The story's fairly engaging, as you hunt the detestable Jericho down, but it's the funny little exchanges you end up listening in on when you jump into someone's car that manage to raise a smile. Whether it's a paranoid old woman complaining about you driving too fast (she hasn't seen anything yet), or an annoyed girlfriend who asks you what she was talking about, "SEE! I told you you didn't listen!", there's always something new when you switch to a new car - which is quite a feat when you consider how many times you'll jump. This also helps add some context to each of the missions. Jump into an ambulance as you try and race a patient to a hospital and you'll find out all about exactly what happened and why they're in such a bad state, one mission puts you behind the wheel as a lovestruck boyfriend trying to help his girlfriend avoid the police, who she claims are after her because she's done nothing wrong (boy, is she in for a surprise) - and then there's the races, which see two Japanese students taking part in illegal street races in order to fund their university tuition.
Sadly, the new shift system brings with it some problems though, in that some missions are a little bit over reliant on it. In some, you'll have to juggle two or three vehicles at once, in order to come in the first two spots in a race, for example, which can be more than a challenge, especially when the AI who takes over the second car seems a bit haphazard. Similarly, some of the mission objectives aren't all that clear - one mission asks you to stay 40ft away from a car, but it actually wants you to stay less than 40ft away.
But perhaps the biggest problem is in Ubisoft's decision to tie the game's replay mode, called the Film Director, into the game's online pass. Letting you edit your own mini film together from your adventures, choosing your own camera angles and effects, the Film Director's a great tool, especially in a game like Driver, but by locking it into the online pass, a lot of people who buy the game won't be able to access it at all. Should you buy the game second hand, if the person who owned the game before you has used the included single-use code, you'll have to pay �6.80 in order to access the game's online mode, and the Film Director. Which you can argue is fine. But for the, at best, 33% of people who don't have their 360 or PS3 connected to the internet, they then have no access to the Film Director mode at all. Because if your console isn't connected to the internet, you can't redeem the code, even if you've bought it first hand, and done everything right. Note to Ubisoft - this is not how to win over the trust of the public.
But with it's enjoyable mix of storyline and car chase gameplay, Driver: San Francisco does more than enough to make up for the few frustrations in the gameplay, and the online pass nonsense. If you're looking for a game with all the style of Bullet, Blues Brothers, and, well, "Fire up the Quattro", some sharp, funny writing, and plenty of missions and collectibles to keep you occupied, Driver: San Francisco could be well worth picking up. So long as your console's connected to the internet, and you have at least a free account.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
