Driv3r - Australian Review

Driver 3 puts you back in the shoes of Tanner, the undercover cop of Machiavellian proportions from the previous games. Your assignment is to infiltrate a notorious car smuggling gang based in Miami and throughout the game your allegiance and ruthlessness will be tested, along with your driving skills of course.

The focus with the Driver series has not only been on driving but also on a free roaming environment where you can go anywhere do just about anything, a style not dissimilar to GTA, Vice City and True Crime. For Driver 3 they have expanded the number of vehicles available to over 80 which not only includes cars, trucks and busses, but bikes and boats as well.

While Driver 3 invokes an open environment motif the mission based design does not make full use of it, and there are no rewards or secondary objectives that encourage you to traverse the cities outside of the mission objectives. The different missions are pasted together by beautifully crafted cut-scenes that feature the Hollywood voices of Michael Madsen, Ving Rhames and Mickey Rourke. The cut-scenes do a great job of setting up the missions but the sheer abundance of them do too much to provide the main impetus for the story leaving the missions very one dimensional and sorely lacking in lateral movement. A typical mission will have you go from point A to point B, upon which you engage in some wholesale slaughter of criminal types in the name of revenge, or you might be there to collect something, often both. Other missions will give you a time limit to complete your objective and while it makes skilled driving at high speeds a necessity, it closes down all possibility of non-linear play, and shouldn’t that be the design goal with an open environment at hand?

Despite a less than open design in gameplay the missions are still enjoyable to some extent. Where the game suffers more is through the glitches that occur in the non-driving aspects of the game combined with the unpolished control system for using Tanner in the 3rd person.

To take a number of examples in one mission you must steal cars and put them on a moving truck. Once a car is on the truck the only option you have is to get out of the car, but do this and you glitch outside the truck and are left standing in the middle of the road. Another example: If you’re unlucky enough to fall out of a boat you can climb back in via a ladder, but press the button to climb and you glitch thru to the driver’s seat and start the engine!

Being a game that is mostly occupied with driving the game engine focuses very much on creating a realistic driving experience; being able to take corners sideways and getting an adrenalin rush as you dodge cars, pedestrians and everything else whilst racing towards your objective. The driving physics are indeed what you would expect, however the game engine is let down in a number of other areas. Although Driver 3 utilises a very large world map, it still suffers from a lack of draw distance with buildings, vehicles and other objects popping into screen as you approach. Understandably such a large map does not allow for highly detailed textures but Driver 3 often struggles in terms of refresh rate and frame rate, with the surrounds chugging past ruining the aesthetics, and your sense of speed.

In an attempt to save some processing power a lot of objects will not be affected if you drive through them- or ram into them. Of course you will see all the vehicles take real-time damage, but ram into a tree or light poles and it’s like hitting a brick wall, an aspect that detracts from the otherwise realistic driving experience.

A combination of slickly produced cut-scenes and linear missions, Driver 3 falls short of the expectations that continual delays seem to have promised. After creating such large cities,Reflections have failed to use this potential offering no incentive to utilise the surrounds. With no hidden extras or surprises Driver 3 is strictly what you see is what you get. A small number of mini-games that include chase and escape sequences as well as driving through cones, give you an arena in which you can test your driving skills, and you can replay your glory in any manner you see fit via the film director mode. Sadly, Driver 3 is often more a combination of frustration and rote learning of levels than awesome driving. In the end it seems that there has been too much emphasis on technological additions and slick intros instead of revolving the game around the frantically high speeds and death defying manoeuvres that players crave so much.

Score = 6.0/10