"Be Good. Be Bad. Be Both." reads the game description. It is, my friend, it is. More bad than good howev
Summary: You play a cop, called Tanner, who is trying to find out who is the buyer of 40 stolen cars. So once again he has to go undercover to infiltrate the crime syndicate in Miami… The game is as exciting as it sounds. A mission based driving game, that has some 3rd person shooting action parts, but fails at being fun in Story Mode – the main mission-based mode, but Take a Drive - the free roam mode is the best part of the game. Sadly, it doesn’t even save the game, and the extra mini games and the video of the making of Driv3r makes this title seem even more miserable. Obvious effort was put into the game, but it doesn’t make the game any more bearable, or me anymore forgiving. Lots of minor things about this game add up to make this game really annoying.
Gameplay: It’s a driving game which is derived from its infancy from the early Driver titles (for those that have playing those mission based games), with more on foot action (which was introduced into Driver 2, but wasn’t really in depth), taking on such GTA-esque actions. Pretty much you can control you character to get into various cars, drive them around, get guns, and shoot at people. The cars sounds all too similar, and the car physics is suppose to be realistic (saying Michael Madsen saying from the Making Of video), but all too often cars act like a brick on wheels and doesn’t feel right. Unnatural at times especially when you slide a car over a different surface, like grass or pavement and the car goes schizty. The car acts like you are not in full control, where as when a computer controlled car drives like a F1 driver that is directly linked to the vehicle using neural transmitters which controls the vehicle by a connection to a computer from their brain to the car. Although this seems very minor as the handling of cars can be easily gotten used to, most of the cars feel extremely generic, handling similarly offering not much choice is which car to pick other than out of the sport car range (which can be 1-3 different types in a location) or the rust buckets, though the truck is one of the fastest vehicle in the game, if not is. There are a certain number of vehicles that are locked to location, so Miami, Nice and Istanbul have different vehicles, but they are all so similar you probably only miss the Lamborghini look-a-like in Nice. The cars look good. They have realistic damage locations when they get hit. It looks very sweet. Fenders broken or hanging off, windows, damaged panels, you can see bullet holes, tires can get shot… it’s really good. But that’s enough about the cars.
Outside of the car, you character is realistically nimble - for a cop. Can’t strafe too fast, he moves like he’s constipated and feels like he’s been eating way too many doughnuts… Ok, seriously, the gunplay in this game is annoying. There is no lock-on or anything such aiming aid other than a cross hair. As for enemies, their aiming skills are really good. You can’t expect to go through a mission that has disposed armed men without getting hit. Health kits aren’t generously given, but they appear at locations where you are expected to get shot at a lot. You can snipe with a sub machine gun. A game that is going down the path of realism and you can snipe with a sub machine gun that is much better than a pistol because it has a longer targeting range but just as accurate… it’s probably not that bad, but it sure is an oversight. Like with many things with this game.
The mini-map doubles as a radar that shows enemy cars as red and police cars as white dots. They both have radiuses as an “area of sight” so they can actually see through building and the street running parallel to the one that they are on so they become hostile and start chasing you. This is annoying especially when you are trying to avoid attention. A car can appear from another street and you have to give them a wide berth by at least 2-3 streets so they can’t see you. Though if you didn’t have enemies/police cars shown on the mini-map, I wouldn’t know how you could do this game.
These things are to be kept in mind as I actually start to get into depth about the game.
Many missions in Story Mode are flat out annoying. I think I’ve retried every mission at least once except for the first one. It seems that whoever devised the missions wanted to increase challenge by introducing the old fixation of trial and error gaming and elements that deliberately annoy the gamer. These usually range from car chases which are quite tricky, as the enemy driving AI is very good. Also there is another variation of the car chase where you have to shoot down the other car to immobilise it. In some chases it is possible to catch up with the opponent car, but don’t even think about touching it or strategically ramming or fish tailing it. It is like trying to derail a train with a push-chair. Their vehicles are so amazingly dead weight that they plough through other cars leaving them blocking the road and causing you to fail the mission, while doesn’t actually happen all that much, but it’s annoying enough that it is worth mentioning. There is one chase that it happens nearly all the time and there is a chance I would fail because a car blocks the road directly in front of me during the speeding chase or causes a mini pile-up. The aim of the chase is not to be too far away from the target, so if you are too far away from the vehicle, even if they are about 40 feet in front of you that you can still visibly see a giant orange arrow above their vehicle, “you have lost them” apparently. Now, the more annoying things: some missions start you off not in a vehicle so you have to run to one while the target vehicle is driving off already. Sometimes the nearest car isn’t directly in your line of sight. You wish the car you started in could go round corners with some speed like your opponents vehicle (without crashing).
There are missions where you have to get out of your car and shoot some guys. Tactics involve peeking around corners and aim at the head, as running into an open gunfight will drain your health very quickly. You can get very far by doing that, but it’s a tedious process, and the mission designers have put challenges in the form of men that run at you blindly shooting at you popping out of nowhere. Most of these moments are scripted events with blokes suddenly running out of doors or blind corners shooting with sub-machine guns which can be fatal at times if you weren’t aware. Which then you’d probably hit Retry and grit your teeth memorising the places where the blokes run out at you and shoot them in the head. The AI isn’t great as they sometimes stand around and shoot at you with sub-machine guns from quite a distance away without trying to get closer to you, or stand around and do nothing, but they can shoot through walls when they feel like it, but that is only when they can’t figure out how to get round an object that’s in the way. I was wondering why they were so accurate at distances I would think they would miss more regularly. There is one mission that this is very noticeable. There are also some more involving on foot missions that involve stealth, but there was only one mission that was really stealth and I used the assault rifle for that.
Now, being undercover, sometimes you need to lose the heat from the police or goons following you. You can do this buy driving wildly/skilfully, or getting out of your car and shooting everyone. This works for police as well. There can be only so many police cars and it takes quite a while before a new one respawns. You then just have to take out the foot policemen that have an “area of sight” white radiuses in the area, then you’ve got a “clean” getaway. Yes, it was another mission that involved the stupid police cars driving straight into the water where I was. Where were the police boats? (There was one, but I think it sank itself.) No helicopters? You can get away with a lot in this game. The impressive thing is that if you are in Take a Drive mode, the police cars become hostile if you do something illegal like speeding near them or slightly dinging another vehicle. I even beeped my horn at them and they got angry. So it isn’t all bad; pretty realistic. Although there are some other twitchy drivers around you and they’ll speed/do criminal infractions, and if they happen to be in the same area as you will get police attention for some reason and you have to start speeding down the highway as well. I take back the “it isn’t all bad” statement…
Some of the other variety missions are annoying because they have some sort of trick to them which involves some knowledge about it that you would have garnered after you had to restart. This game doesn’t seem let you use skill rather than it is an elaborate memory game. You can’t dodge effectively because you are fatty so you peek and shoot, you can’t enjoy some of the chases as they are pretty damn tight that you have to get some of them pretty much flawlessly which involves a good sit down a retry session, and the other missions are really dry and not very well conceived. That just makes it so sad because this game could have been easily much better.
Story: The main core of the game follows Tanner as he begins as a cop to reach a crime scene where a siege is taking place. Unfortunately the missions are pointless and the story makes even less sense. For example, the 2nd mission is a siege at a location which you drive to by following a police car which you cannot stray too far because for some reason you aren’t told where the location is even though you are an officer and you are getting updates of the siege on your radio of the scene turning into a hostage situation without a hostage (?), as the police seem to bluster through without thought about the hostage(s?) using extreme force. You are told to go round to back to cut off any escape, but there are thugs standing around and shooting at you, and more guys defending outside of the place than there should be, then the main guy leaves in a car turning into a car chase. The guy you chase happens to be Calita’s driver, who is the big bad female crime boss, which then played out in a cut scene where you happen to “accidentally” kill, so the gist is that you stand in as the new driver as you go undercover to find who is the buyer of 40 really expensive cars who Calita is selling to.
The next mission shows how apparent that missions in general have zero thought of structure, logic, and congruence towards the story other than getting to forcefully lead the player to one location A to other called location B, but by doing any sort of madness in between. The next mission you have to collect the car and get it to Calita. The process involves you driving to a hotel, and once there you have reach the roof. Once you are on the roof you have to shoot some thugs, and travel across the roof to another building to go down elevator to the car park where the car is located. It beats me why you can’t go straight to the car park. Anyways, you shoot some more guys defending the car, get in the car, don’t damage it too much as Calita wants it fresh as a daisy, but thugs in cars appear out of nowhere and try to take you out. Occasionally they get lost as soon as you leave the car park. Another nonsensical mission completed. It gets worse. There is a strong theme of missions having no real purpose for the story at all, like there is a mission you have to impress a hoodlum by driving through barrels and shooting up a bar (they are easily pleased), there are some other better missions, by strangely those are the ones that mix in your car and out of your car action, some involving boats. There is one mission that I will never forget for being pointless. You have to steal 3 cars and drive them up the back of a lorry that the hoodlum you’ve impressed is driving. The reason you have to do steal them all in one night is because you don’t want to arouse suspicion. Illogical, captain. I would think stealing 3 expensive cars in one night is more suspicious than anything else. Stupidly, when you drive the car inside you have to exit the car, which visually looks ugly as hell, as you clip through the lorry and take damage (depending on how fast the lorry was driving). This mission is one of the hardest as you have to steal 3 vehicles and drive them up the back of the lorry before it reaches the depot. WHY?!?! I could see if there was police around or something that was problematic with driving the 3 vehicles into the depot itself. Or it had to be done by a certain time limit before the local cops got the sniff. It seems the mission designers wanted to put such asinine goal targets on the missions rather than make it have sort of relevance to the story, other than stealing cars. This is why the game is bad. I just found it to be one long running challenge mode game with a story that is so painfully bad I’ve seen 11 year olds write better ones. They usually involve something out of Dragon Ball Z or Pokemon, but I could at least give them credit for being more inventive.
Graphics: Thankfully the locations of Miami, Nice and Istanbul look amazing, which you look it in the right light, the stages look great, but somehow it looks plain in day, and I’m going to blame the lack of dynamic lighting. Take a Drive makes it a pleasure to drive in, but I wish the cars where a bit more zippy and less “realistic”. Not to completely trash this game, you can save replays on the Xbox. With those replays using Film Director, you can make a somewhat interesting replay look amazing using the options available to you such as positioning the camera, slow down/speed up, blur, the infamous (70’s) camera locked to wheel (try to drive through cardboard boxes) and a few more. This can be so entertaining and you can be fiddling with this more than actually playing the main game, which is kind of sad thinking about it. Also the cut-scenes look absolutely top notch. Photo-realistic I’d say, though it jitters badly at times. Not just on my Xbox either. I’ve heard this from many people, but the jitters die later in the game.
Sound: The music is… ok. I know there is some licensed music from obscure artists. Some of the music is memorable, like the ones from Mellowdrone and Phantom Planet because their songs get played the most often, but sadly most of the music in game (not from the cut-scenes) are meh. Cars sound flat, voice acting is solid but truly they are nothing special, and also most of the voice sampled in the game sound really stupid at times outside of the cut-scenes. The best example would be cops saying, “Freeze!” and “Get of the car! You’re under arrest!” You get out and all they do is shoot at you without attempting to arrest you. Especially when you are already out of the car and you are shooting at them (and that is them saying “Get out of the car!!”). Also there is a big problem with voices being really low in volume in cut-scenes as well, which post-production should have done something about that, as well as the damn jittering.
Well let’s look over this game:
The Good:
Take a Drive Mode – driving aimlessly around a city and random destruction is better than doing the aimless Story Mode random missions.
Film Director – you can make a decent replay. It looks cool like a 70’s movie!!
The cities are very well done.
Cut-scenes look damn good.
The Bad:
Story Mode – it’s poopy.
Mini Games – it would be better if you got something good out of them because they are rather hard. I rather do Story Mode… um… maybe…
Mostly everything else about the game.
The Ugly:
The AI shooting through walls.
Dumb missions.
The story blows.
How lame the ending was.
If this game was part of a Western, it would be driven out of town and told never to be seen again in town or be shot on sight. Sadly, this game seems to be brought up on the rough neck of the neighbour, been given charm lessons and has been grifting for most of it later life (being a reference to Driv3r, not the series).
The game is pretty; the cities are great, but anything past that and localised car damage, everything is so undeveloped. Story is crap, and missions are so weak that it even feels unfinished when you completed the game. Having a great cast of well known actors voicing characters, a licensed soundtrack (that seems to of only licensed 7 tracks and the rest from studio), and awesome looking FMV that are photo-realistic doesn’t make a game. It tried to be dark, gritty, and an entertaining game, but came off rather unconvincing. The missions didn’t seem to try to add any dramatic effect to the game, and it’s rather frustrating, even with its bugs and glitches and how you can abuse dumb AI. Along the way of during production this game went rotten. Someone else could write a better story, someone else could do better mission design so it feels halfway good. Then you have to make some of the mechanics better like the AI, player movement and guns, and remove bugs, then you are getting there. Make all those things tie together so the game feels like it should be; an exciting thriller, with your character sent into the dark underbelly of a criminal syndicate to avoid being ratted out and killed, and to avoid being caught by police. The game felt nowhere near that.
There are some nice things about it, but it depends if you want to risk eating an apple given to you by an old woman that you have never seen before, knowing full well that the apple has been loaded up with anthrax. It really depends how hungry you are. Or you aren’t going to eat that apple but found out that you are one apple short for apple bobbing. Don’t bite too deep, though… otherwise you’d definitely lose your appetite, and probably vomit blood. Damn shame. This game could be so easily better but they probably ran out of money hiring pricey voice actors, decent graphics artists and photographers to go on location to gather information to make up the cities, and not enough on the programmers who revolted and hated sleeping on the floors all the time… um, maybe not. Wasted potential. So sad…