A prime example of an over hyped game.

User Rating: 5.4 | DRIV3R XBOX
Driver 3 is the highly anticipated sequel to driver 2, developed by Reflections interactive and published by Atari.

Like Driver 2 you play as a undercover cop by the name of Tanner or The Driver his mission in driver 3 is to work undercover with the car thieves as they attempt to ship forty of the worlds most expensive cars to a mysterious buyer. You start from Miami, and then arrive in Nice then finally to Istanbul. The story isn’t much to go for, it is weak yet effective, but to me it feels like it has just simply been robbed from gone in sixty seconds then altered.

It should take an average player 10 - 12 hours to complete the main story mode, there are some optional side missions from the story that can be accessed from the main title screen such as take a ride and some checkpoint races but they really aren’t worth your time unless you are a diehard fan or want to try out possibly the best feature in the game the theatre mode, where you record your progress then edit it and then play it back to yourself in a Hollywood style projection.

The Story is told from beautifully rendered cut scenes that look incredibly lifelike, but this is only the start of the problems for driver 3 as the cut scenes look so good they make the rest of the game look shabby and unfinished.

Graphically the game isn’t that bad, the lighting is spot on, and the car models look especially nice but as for the rest of the game it feels like Reflections just gave up and forgot to finish the rest of the game. To start of Tanner looks nothing like what he does in the cut scenes if it had dent to be that he half of the time is addressed as Tanner of that he wore the same clothes you would have a hard time figuring out who he was. As for the environments, they look good but I feel that they could have made the overall graphical presentation of the game a hell of a lot better.

But although when you finally get to see the graphics they look ok is, that gets completely overridden by frequent graphical glitches that prove just how unfinished and rushed Driver 3 is. Normally when you approach a new section of buildings for instance, before you get within sight of them the textures and graphics are supposed to shift from low res to high res, but this doesn’t happen soon enough and by the time you can notice them you can see the ugly looking textures that simply just don’t belong in a xbox game or for that matter any current gen console.

But there is more glitches half of the time the frame rate dips beyond playable level, and I have had the game crash out on me many times when there have been a lot of enemies on the screen, it appears that driver 3 wanted to achieve all this action but when they put it all together it just didn’t work.

Also the A.I in the game is terrible the pedestrians half of the time simply just stand there unable to notice you standing two foot in found of them firing a shotgun, the police A.I isn’t all that smart either every time they are called out they seem to do nothing but crash. And as for the animations all I can say is has Reflections heard of a thing called motion capture as they definitely haven’t used it on tanner as you can tell by the way he walks.

Like Driver 2 Driver 3 introduces into the game again out of car moments which they really should try to avoid as the gun play is just weak, you will spend ages pulling as light as possible on the joystick to finally get it to aim properly as of how sensitive the aiming is. They are a wide variety of guns from pistols, light machine guns to grenade launchers but all the guns that are in the same class all but a increased or decreased rate of fire, all feel the same and just adds to the overall bore that it is to be out of the car, which is a shame as most of the missions you spend out of the car and this is the main reason which makes the game so bad.

As for that the in car sections are the best part of the game as the driving when gotten used to is pretty fun, but this fun can be ruined within seconds as of some objects you are able to drive straight through them where as some just stop all of your forward motion instantly usually resulting in you getting caught by the cops or mission failure.

The Sound is possibly the best part of the game. Driver 3 has an all star cast for the voices of the characters such as Michael Madson (Reservoir Dogs) Mikey Rooke (Sin City) Michelle Rodriguez (Resident evil) but even this all star cast can not save driver 3 as half of the guns sound really uninspired and in that matter weak, but the in game soundtrack is pretty good and seems to fit the game pretty well.

Before I started playing driver 3 I was in a positive mood, I thought I would be able to look past what all was saying that it was unfinished, broken and boring. But I have never predicted that it surely was this bad; it truly is the biggest disappointment to come to the gaming world within the last 5 years.

A prime example of an over hyped game.