Let’s face it, with the success that the GTA series has accomplished, many companies are doing what they can to take the formula and make it their own. Games like True Crime, Simpson’s Hit & Run, and recently Spiderman 2 have had elements of the GTA franchise incorporated into their gameplay. Atari has taken their turn in trying to knock off GTA as king of non-linear based games. Unfortunately, Atari doesn’t even come close to hitting the apple on top of Rockstar’s head.

In Driv3r, you are in the shoes of Tanner, an FBI agent who is trying to infiltrate a car thief ring. You start the game in Miami, then move onto France, and finally Istanbul. Their goal is to steal 40 exotic cars. Your goal is to stop them....obviously. The story itself isn’t that intriguing and doesn’t do a good job of bringing you in to the point where you want to continue playing and progress the story. After a while, I would just skip past the cutscenes to get back into the game. I can’t believe they actually paid someone to write this script.

Before I get to the bad(there’s a lot), I’ll start with the good(which isn’t much). The best part of Driv3r is the graphics. When you start the game a cinematic sequence opens, one can’t helped be amazed by how great the sequence looks. It is reminiscent of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. After the opening credits, you finally start the game. This is how the GTA series should have looked. After arriving at the police station, you start your training on how to use your gun. You go through the hallways and have to shoot the bad guy targets, while keeping your trigger finger at bay when the civilians pop up. If you’ve played Vice City, you’ll find it is a lot like the mission at Phil’s gun store, only not as fun.

Another good point that Driv3r has is Live Aware. If you’re playing Driv3r and one of your buddies hops online to play some Rainbow Six 3, or Mechassault, and wants you to join, they can send you an invite. This feature will be very useful, because after playing Driv3r for any length at all will become quite frustrating. More on that later. Although Driv3r isn’t playable online, you can upload videos of your most destructive carnage that you have unleashed on the city. It’s a nice feature, but after viewing about five videos, they all seemed to do about the same thing. Why? Because there really isn’t much variety in weapons or places in the environments to take advantage of. Probably the last good element that Driv3r has, is that unlike Mr. Vercetti, Tanner can actually swim in the water...for a short period of time. After being in the water for a certain amount of time, your health bar begins to decrease. At least it’s an improvement.

Now, on with the bad. Where do I begin? Let’s start with the gameplay. If I had to pick just one word to describe the gameplay, it would be horribly-frustrating. I know that’s two, but technically one with the hyphen. This is the most frustrating game I have ever played. In fact, it’s the only game where I have thrown my controller down. The targeting system is so bad, it feels incomplete. When you have your gun out to shoot, you use the left analog stick to move around, and the right to aim. At first, it takes a while to get used to the feel of aiming, but you never feel comfortable. It would have been easier to stick with ripping of GTA and use the left trigger to aim for you. Many times you will have to try a mission over and over again because you are getting drilled with bullets and unable to do much damage to the bad guys. One thing that I found useful was to just aim for the head everytime. Easier said than done.

With a name like Driv3r, you would think that driving would be the most important element to the game. You would also expect to have a nice assortment of cars to hijack and cruise around the town. Not so with Driv3r. The types of cars in the game are limited to about 6 per city(that I was able to see, anyway). In addition to the lack of car variety, Atari also opted to take out any variety in the speeds of the vehicles. No matter which car you drive, they all handle the same and go the same speed. When I say “handle”, I use that term very loosely. All of the cars feel very heavy and it is hard to get some good turns in while you’re chasing the baddies. For the missions that you need a car, you need to stay very close to the suspect you’re chasing. If there are able to get a certain distance away from you, the mission ends. There is no catching up, period. I see this as a major flaw, especially since the drivers your are chasing end up crashing into other cars because they drive so erratic. You should at least get a chance to catch up, or a timer should have been put in to give you some motivation in sticking close. Most of the time you get behind because you end up running into another car, hit a light post (that doesn’t move) or can’t see because your hood flies up. Guess Tanner should have used 10W30. During the main story mode, you are forced to complete mission objectives to keep the story moving. You can, like GTA, move freely about the city doing what you wish, but you have to this in a separate mode called, ‘Take A Ride’. I don’t understand why Atari felt the need to put this in as an option all of its own, instead of incorporating it into the main game. This takes the frustrating factor up another notch.

You can also opt to partake in some driving games. There are six mini-driving games, with two sub-games, for twelve in all. One has you chasing down a bad guy, another has you trying to elude the cops and neither are much fun. Don’t get too excited about having two sub-games, if you were at all, because the second game is exactly the same as the first, only in a different part of town. I hated to burst your bubble. It doesn’t seem as if there were a lot of thought into these mini-games to give players more variety for their money.

As I stated earlier, the graphics are gorgeous, but they come with a price. The framerate is horrible. It chugs when you get a good amount of cars clustered together, which isn’t good during the driving based missions. This usually causes you to run into another car, getting behind and increasing your chances of failing the mission. The only negative aspect of the graphics is the cities don’t seem to come alive. There are pedestrians about, but they all look the same, and are even harder to hit while driving. The textures on the outskirts of the cities are bland, and there doesn’t seem to be much interaction with the environment. No walking into buildings, no ramps to jump and no garages to stash cars you’ve stolen. Even the car crashes are bland. When you finally get some speed and decide to crash into another car, it’s like hitting a brick wall. You stop in your tracks. At least the other car moves back, but it won’t jump the sidewalk or come off the ground at all.

With all of the hype that surrounded Driv3r, I was expecting something that would tear me away from Vice City. Sadly, all I could think about while playing Driv3r was popping in Vice City and doing anything at any given moment, instead of having to follow a boring story with shoddy gameplay. Driv3r is truly a model of style over substance.

Fun-5
Graphics-8.7
Value-7.5
Gameplay-5
Sound-7

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