Are the Driver games any good?

I remember playing the original Driver game on the PS1. It was very unique to me at the time and I enjoyed my time with it but I didn't spend a lot of time with it and have forgotten 100% what the gameplay was like. I also played some of Driver: Parallel Lines on the Xbox. The little I played was okay. Now I'm seriously considering buying Driver 3, Driver: Parallel Lines and Driver: San Fransico because for some reason I'm interested in revisiting the series.

As I never played these games past the halfway point, I'm interested in the opinions of those who have played any of the games. What did you think of it? Are they any good? Is the concept like GTA?

Yeah. It influenced GTA in someway.(With Dirver 1 and Shenmue Rockstar realized where they should take the franchise from it's 2D top down view)

In Driver games you play as Tanner, a character that is an undercover cop working for thugs to get to big fish.(That's as much as I understood from it back in the day)

Driver 1: Excellent game. Get the PC version since it has less performance issues and better graphics.

Driver 2: Never played it.

Driv3r: I was disappointed by it. Too much on foot sections, bad on foot sections , bugs and that hitbox issue in that gun section of chapter 2.(Which made me stop playing and deleting it)

Driver Parallel Lines: Better than 3 but I didn't like it that much. Cops keep shooting you non stop in chases, escaping from them is too easy(Police Chases were inferior to the ones in 1) and it had 2 era that didn't make the game in any way better.(Just going into the second era all your progress from the 60s era will be gone)

Driver San Francisco: Never played it.

Love playing Driv3r on PS2. Its ever prettier than GTA games! Really, really tough, tho, but on the other hand, the gameplay is easier to handle than Mafia/GTAIII/VC were on PS2. So, recommended.

Driver SF on last gen is bit of a... -well, its really entertaining game, and a really strange one. The graphics were horrible, tho, kinda red tinted ghost vision that made me sick.

Driver 1 was a revelation back in 1999: those physics and the damage model were astonishing. Driver 2 was more of the same with a weak undercooked on foot mode. Driver 3 was an unfinished mess and the following ones are pretty run-of-the-mill post GTA affairs. San Francisco is a fun game in my opinion, worth a play.

Finally, if you want to be impressed, check out the GBA port of Driver 3: not fun to play, but it's a full open world 3D game on a system that amounted to little more than a portable Super Nintendo.