The Driver series has been one of Atari's powerhouse franchises ever since the original game debuted in 1999. UK-based developer Reflections Interactive, whose work on the Destruction Derby franchise had shown its knack for realistic car physics, offered up a unique blend of cinematic visuals and white-knuckled racing gameplay that was quite unique in its day. The only speed bump for the franchise involved the limitations of the hardware that it ran on. Although a powerful little system, the original PlayStation wasn't quite up to the task of providing visuals that matched the quality of the ambitious gameplay Reflections was creating. With the upcoming release of the third entry in the series, Driver 3, it appears that Reflections may have finally found a generation of consoles that can do justice to its game concept. Last night at an Atari press event, we had the opportunity to try out work-in-progress versions of the game for the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox (a PC version is also planned), and both gave us a feel for what to expect from the ambitious title.

The level of city detail in Driver 3's environments is immense and truly impressive.

The game's story follows the adventures of Tanner, the undercover police officer who starred in the previous entries in the series. Although it's been some time since we checked in on him, he hasn't mellowed any. Driver 3 finds the ruthless cop attempting to infiltrate a global car-theft-ring. Tanner is intent on discovering the identity of a mysterious buyer who has ordered the theft of 40 high performance cars, and he desperately wants to stop the deal. But, as usual, his cover is always perilously close to being blown, and time is of the essence. (You'd think the old boy would actually get better at working undercover by now.) While this means tough times for Tanner, it all translates into a meaty game.

Driver 3 features three modes of play: undercover, take a ride, and driving games. Undercover is the game's story mode and features roughly 30 missions that are set in the three cities of Miami, Florida; Nice, France; and Istanbul, Turkey. Take a ride is a free-ride mode that lets you tool around the cities and lets you absorb the work the development team has put into creating the vast virtual environments as well as into the realistic vehicles. Finally, the driving game mode lets you play minigames in the city of your choice.

The demo versions on hand last night offered a smattering of the game's various play modes, and the PlayStation 2 demo actually featured a sampling of all three modes. The mission mode featured one task that was set in each city; take a ride let us roam through each of the cities at one of three different times of day; and the driving game let us try three of the minigames. The Xbox version of the game only offered the take a ride option.

Grizzled undercover cop Tanner is working to infiltrate and take down a sinister ring of car thieves.

The mission mode's three offerings presented three distinctly different multipart experiences. The Miami mission, called Police HQ, is an introductory level that lets you get a feel for the basic game mechanics. You start out on foot in a house, and you make your way to police headquarters by car. This level showed off one of the most interesting aspects of the game's presentation for when you're on foot, which is the use of an indoors first-person view that changes to a third-person view when you're outdoors. The transition is fairly sudden but seems to work well in gameplay terms; the result is you don't run into any of the annoying camera issues that affect other, similar games when the player is running around indoors. We would have liked to see weapon models from the first-person view, though.

The Nice mission, Rescue Dubois, is a two-part arrangement that starts you out on foot in a timed shooting sequence that requires you to reach a location indicated by an on onscreen arrow before your health runs out. Once you reach the checkpoint, you have to make your way through a building by shooting people as you go. You eventually reach an automobile, which triggers a cinematic that kicks off the car portion of the level. Once the cinematic is over, you have to hop into the nearest car, and you must tear off after your quarry, whose position is displayed via a minimap in the lower right-hand portion of the screen. It seemed to us that the pursued opponent actually took different paths through the city on subsequent replays of this mission.