The critics and reviewers out there must have crashed a lot because honestly, Driver 3 is not really that bad.
Anyway, you play as an FBI agent called Tanner who has gone undercover to stop a ring of criminals from stealing exotic cars. While your undercover, you meet Jericho (For those who played Driver 2 you will remember him). Jericho basically blows you cover and you will have to use guns and cars to take down Jericho and his gang. You will play across 3 cities: Miami, Nice France and Istanbul Turkey.
There are three modes to this game: Undercover, Take a ride and driving games. For those who are fans of the last 2 driver games, this will look familiar, Undercover is the story mode, Take a ride is the free roam and Driving games features mini games such as checkpoint race, quick chase and survival.
The good side is that character models look good, cars look good and the environment looks good. Driver 3 expands on Driver 2 by allowing you to have guns, drive boats and running over people. The story is well done with good voice acting and good cutscenes. In fact, the cutscenes are probably on of the best looking cutscenes on the PS2.
Now, there is some bad news. There are some framerate issues, for example, you will sometimes see a line in the sky. The cop A.I. is stupid: If you are being chased and you dive into the ocean, they will drive their cars into the ocean and if there is a guard rail, they will ram it, back up and ram it again. Its almost like if they are really desperate to throw their cars into the ocean. But, the worst part of this game is the on foot action. Sure there are a variety of weapons but killing the bad guys is easy. You can get shot up a lot and you will not die. Plus, the characters show no emotions when a shootout happens. Its almost like they are robots. There is no form of multi-player and after you complete the game the story leaves you hanging. Of course Im not gonna tell you because that would be a spoiler.
I would recommend this game for the Driver fans and for those who have never played GTA. Only a few GTA fans will enjoy it. Overall I really dont find this game as bad as the critics say.