GAMEPLAY: 3

Driv3r opens promising enough. The opening scene is the most cinematic and involving to date. The opening lays a rich, mysterious atmosphere that makes the user anxious to see what is to come next.

Immediately following the opening gambit the game introduces the voice actors, and the A-list celebrity roll is impressive: Michael Madsen, Iggy Pop, Ving Rhames, and Michelle Rodriguez are all actors within the game. The opening credits continue to roll over an impressive in-game cutscene, adding flavor and atmosphere, and gearing the player up for what is sure to be a very cool experience.

 The player is best served turning the game off at this point, because the best part of the game has passed, and only ugliness, shallowness, and frustration are to follow.

You are taken inside your Miami rich-guy house, a strange setting for an FBI agent somehow attached to the Miami PD, but if Miami Vice could pull it off, Driv3r can too. You are instructed that the range is open so you can get some firearm practice in. You are to drive to the police station to accomplish that task. Good luck.

For a game called Driv3r, having driving mechanics as horrible as they are in Driv3r is inexcusable. The driving portion of the game is stupidly frustrating. One hopes that one will get used to the ultra-touchy controls as one progresses further into the game, but one’s hopes will not come to fruition. A particularly wily user will attempt to tweak the control sensitivity, but will find that has zero effect on the gameplay. The physics used in Driv3r are decent, and the damage modeling is impressive, but it is deeply reminiscent of Carmageddon II--especially as doors swing open and stay open on severely damaged cars. The cities you drive around in are not completely devoid of life, but do feel a bit empty. Almost any item in the game can be crashed and broken, except for light poles, which will bring your car to a complete and immediate stop whenever they are contacted, however slight that contact may be. Even though Driv3r employs the use of an analog stick, you go in basically three different directions: ”frickin’ left, frickin’ right, and frickin’ straight.”

Driv3r is an exercise in control futility. Your vehicle will swerve wildly at the slightest provocation. It accelerates at a rate that would make Chuck Yeager wince. It generally does as good a job at modeling how real-world vehicles handle as an amish computer programmer would. Your first little drive from your Crocket-and-Tubbs love shack to the police station will go something along these lines:

--pull out from garage, instantly hit 40 mph, making the right turn onto the driveway impossible. Oversteer to the right. Overcorrect to the left, destroy two hedges, and plow into the fence across the street.

--Spend a good five minutes figuring out the mysteries of reverse

--Point rather badly damaged car down the street for a festival of swerves in and out of traffic. This is a lot like how Nick Nolte must experience driving.

--Hit a light pole, stop

--Hit another car

--Handbrake into the police station, blues-brothers style, only to have the damage meter flashing bright red. Interestingly, even though I have run over two pedestrians, demolished one item of federal property (a mailbox), wrecked several cars, and generally have been driving like Gary Bussey on a speedball, my wanted meter is at zero.

Unfortunately, the entire game is a series of frustrating drives such as this one. There is no modification to the control scheme that allows a decent amount of control while driving. Using the keyboard is a joke, using an analog joypad is somewhat better, but still basically unusable, and getting the wheel and pedals to work with Driv3r took too much time and delivered too little results.

As bad as the driving is, it is head-and-shoulders above the on-foot portion of the game. Your character RUNS everywhere, but when he must make a tight turn, he must STOP and then turn as if he is in wet cement. This strange control-into-action translation ruins any fun the combat could have been, and completely blows any verisimilitude the game has produced up to this point.

GRAPHICS: 7
In a strange way, the game reminds me quite a bit of Crazy Taxi, without all the color or insane framerates. The textures are a little bland, the cities a little dead, and the cars themselves a little washed out. Where Crazy Taxi was bright, vibrant, had a city full of people, places, and other cars, Driv3r is a little bland; a bit like a cold fish.

The animations are dumb. Your character will charge headlong towards a door at full speed, then slow down and casually open it, only to start barreling down whatever environment waits on the other side. The animations aren’t tied well to the sound effects, and the entire game gives a very plastic feel to the gameworld. (You know plastic when I speak about it; like when a character picks up a telephone, and instead of grabbing it, just kind of mushes his hand into the receiver, picks it up, talks, puts the phone back into the cradle, missing it by a good five inches, only to have the receiver morph back into the proper position once the character ends the animation).

The one saving grace is the cutscenes. They are beautiful, well done, and very entertaining. The gameplay and game graphics are so far below what we see in the cutscenes, one has to wonder if the cutscenes weren't produced by another studio all together.

 SOUND: 7
The cars sound great, as they should in a driving game. The voice acting is up to par, but a little disappointing considering the talent brought on. Iggy Pop in particular hams it up, and Michael Madsen phones his lines in. The music in the cutscenes is great, but the in-game music is forgettable.

REPLAY VALUE: 0
The author (myself) believes that no other game either made or that will be made will be less replayable than this one. The author would rather suffer through The Punisher again than to have to pick up the crashtacular control scheme in Driv3r for a second go-through.

To sum up, the driving physics are pulled from Carmageddon 2, the on-foot control is pulled from Ultima Underworld, the driving was pulled from the Sega Genesis version of OutRun. There is a reason why all the games I’ve listed are five, ten, fifteen years old. . .because Driv3r plays like a game from a past generation.

THE GOOD:

• First Rate cast and voice acting

• The best cutscenes in any game to date

• Great sounding cars

THE BAD:

 • Impossible vehicle controls

• Herky-jerky animations

• Performance demands much too high for what the engine delivers

• Shallow storyline