DRIV3R

Major review rewrite - Jun 9 2022

The Driver series is one that has tried to become something more than an ordinary video game since its beginnings. The first Driver game, released in 1999, was structured as a proof of concept rather than a complete experience. A massive ‘proof of concept’ by the PS1’s standards, but one that clearly had not said all it needed to say. At the time, the 'open world driving' concept had only a few examples. Similar to Midtown Madness, the original Driver game would let you get chased by the police, cause damage by smashing into cars, and explore the open world through free play. The cutscenes, missions, and characters are all basic, presenting an outline of what could happen if you tried to turn a game into a classic action movie.

Yet, it wasn't until Driver 2 that the series had evolved into something that could pass as 'video game cinema'. The characters, cutscenes, and environments had all been noticeably upgraded. Even Tanner, the main character, had been changed from a blunt-speaking, deep voiced badboy into a believable undercover cop trying to get to the bottom of a convoluted case. This game also introduces getting out of the car and getting into a different one. The on-foot controls are finicky, but the idea is good enough that it was worth putting up with.

Fast forward another year, and you get the release of Grand Theft Auto III. Getting out of one car and entering another was one thing, but GTA III brought the run and gun action straight to the player's hands. Besides that, GTA added tons of extra content through bonus missions and tons of hidden collectable objects. The cars exploded after they flipped over, and you could run over the pedestrians, too! Add this onto the improved usage of the open world map for mission selection, and suddenly Driver's linear mission structure would not be able to compete. However, this did not stop the developers of Driver 3 from trying.

Before Driver 3 was released, the Reflections team had worked on Stuntman for the PS2, which further honed their skills in creating multiple environments filled with firework shows of physics. In Stuntman, you once again get to be 'the driver', though this time the action would take place through scripted movie scenes. You’d be instructed to weave between traffic cars and crash into stuff while executing specific stunts. Despite the simple premise, Stuntman would obtain the reputation of being one of the most difficult driving games of all time. And while I’ve had more trouble with other racing games released around the same time, I have to admit that it’s pretty tough! The real problem with Stuntman was that, despite being a PS2 exclusive, the game's framerate performance was abysmal. It's constantly lagging and slowing down, making the challenges far more annoying to complete. This frustration would only get worse when encountering the game's numerous bugs.

This problem of bugs would end up becoming the focus of Driver 3's release once the game had finally come out. In the time that Driver 3 was being made, Grand Theft Auto Vice City had again taken the open world genre, and consequently video games as a whole, another step forward. Vice City had moved the GTA series closer to the 'video game movie' the Driver series was dreaming of. And much to the horror of Reflections in 2004, San Andreas was right around the corner with the anticipation of pushing the genre past anything the Driver series could hope to accomplish. Driver 3's stratospheric ambitions were becoming more humbling with each passing year, leaving the company no choice but to shove the game out onto shelves before San Andreas could completely wipe it into irrelevancy.

I doubt you need me to rehash the ‘Driv3rgate’ story, but I’ll get through it quick. Essentially, a desperate UK gaming magazine publisher got a hold of Driver 3 copies early under the pretense that the major bugs would get ironed out before the game’s release. This turned out to be untrue, and so their high scores for the Xbox and PS2 versions of the game seemed out of place next to the flood of negative reviews once the game released. This gaffe was a small issue in the long run, though the ensuing internet forum shitshow makes for an amusing footnote.

The idea of a controversy spawning from a high score given to a buggy early access copy of a game is funny by today’s standards. Thanks to the awful Metacritic standards of the industry, reviewers are given unreasonable pressure to hand out higher scores to busted games for similar reasons. During the Prey (2017) documentary, former Arkane president Raphael Colantonio suggests that the game’s lackluster sales were due to its review scores, specifically pointing out the 4/10 IGN review for the PC version. In it, Dan Stapleton knocks off half the game’s score due to late-game save corruption glitches that caused the game to be unfinishable. Raphael goes on to say that it’s unfair for a reviewer to give a low score to a game that they enjoyed for 30+ hours even if it ended up being broken. Games can get patched, after all. And when it was patched a week later, the IGN review was quickly bumped to an 8. But still, righteous commenters accused Dan of causing irreparable damage to the game’s reputation due to the initial 4/10 review. And ultimately, I’m left asking myself the same question… is it fair?

You’d think it’d make sense to give a low score to a game that can’t be finished, though consider that some video games simply do get released unfinished. Take for example the 2014 game D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die. This game was advertised as an episodic series, yet only the first two episodes were ever released. Despite this, the Steam user reviews for the game currently sit at 'very positive', seeming to hint at the idea that players tend to prefer playability over pure amounts of content. And yet, modern critics seem to be on the opposite side of this spectrum. A game like Cyberpunk 2077 is one that, even with the right equipment, has many noticeable glitches and annoyances. Despite this, the PC version of the game has majorly positive reviews, claiming the bugs are ‘mostly visual’ or that the ‘day one patch’ will fix things later.

Driver 3 is a game released in a time where downloadable ‘day one patches’ weren’t a standard practice. Critics at the time could only work with what they had, but at the same time, Driver 3 is far less buggy when compared to Cyberpunk 2077! Most of the worst visual horrors stem from the PC port (such as polygon spikes sticking out of cars). The console versions of the game have their own assortment of bugs, though there aren’t many that warrant the game’s 5/10 reputation. As it is, Driver 3 gives the impression that its low review scores are due to its glitchy performance, but once you play through the Undercover mode, you’ll figure out that this isn’t the case. The problems in Driver 3 are ones that bug fixes can’t repair.

Once you start playing the game for the first time, you'll begin noticing Driver 3's catch-up with the Grand Theft Auto series. In this game, Tanner can not only drive cars, but boats and motorcycles as well. Unlike GTA, you can swim through water, but doing so is extremely slow, as are the boats. The missions try to make use of these mechanics by forcing you to use a boat for certain objectives, or forcing you to swim to access another part of the level. It's never fun. The water is flat and featureless, and piloting a boat in this game will only make you wish you were driving a car, instead.

The physics of the cars, on the other hand, is Driver 3's major highlight. As opposed to GTA's speedy cartoon aesthetics, Driver 3 is gritty and realistic. This is reflected with how the cars bounce and sway while driving around. Every car’s driving truly feels unique, from sports cars to sedans to trucks. You can pop a car's tires individually by shooting them, which affects the way the car handles. The windows can be shot and broken individually, and pieces of the car can fall off one by one as you damage it. Once you get your hands on a grenade launcher, the fun grows exponentially as you can launch cars into the sky and watch as they ping-pong off of the environment.

From the perspective of visual design and graphical spectacle, Driver 3 is surprisingly attractive. Not everything looks great, with a noticeable amount of textures appearing flat, though the design of the buildings and cars deserve some credit. The cutscenes of the game further show Reflections' fixation on cinematography. The visuals of these cutscenes have been improved massively from Driver 2, as well as the movie-inspired camera angles. Wanting to lean harder into the 'action movie' premise, Driver 3's gameplay and cutscenes are filled with explosions and shooting, including a mission with a direct reference to the movie Speed where your car blows up if you drop below 50 mph.

Unfortunately though, the story of Driver 3 is just as much of an unfocused mess as Driver 2's was. Half of the characters in this game are no-fucks-given criminal badasses who do what they want and kill who they want, with Tanner bouncing around them like a pinball as he tries to untangle an illegal 'car theft ring'. One of the antagonists from Driver 2, Jericho, ends up becoming the focal point of this game's story. His role is vague, though he's involved in this 'car theft ring' in one way or another. Considering how badly this game wishes to be a movie, it'd help if the game's plot had some sort of comprehensible structure!

And for the first time in the Driver series, Tanner can finally shoot a gun whenever he wants to. On foot, in a car, in a boat, on a bike, you can always bust out that pistol and shoot at people (except ironically, when you’re swimming). You couldn’t do this in Driver 2, and all of the shootout action had to take place during the game's cutscenes. Now that the shackles have been released, however, Driver 3's missions overwhelm the player with obnoxious shooting segments. Out of the 27 missions in this game, only 7 of them don’t feature an on-foot shootout. And boy do these shootouts suck. You peak around corners and slowly take out the mountains of enemies one by one while they stand still and shoot at you. Unlike the GTA games, the shooting mechanics are slow and stiff, as are Tanner's running and jumping. The combat is mind numbing, and yet, at least half of the game takes place on foot.

Surprise surprise, the DRIVING is the best part of this DRIVER game. And still, the driving segments of these missions are lacking in creativity. Most of the time, your interaction with a car will involve either driving across the city to get to a shootout, following an enemy car around (which usually ends in a shootout), or getting to a location while enemy cars chase you (and shoot at you). These environments are huge, yet most of these missions are linear and simple. Why not feature missions that focus on causing damage to the environment or other cars? Other mission ideas are borrowed from Driver 2. 'Dodge Island' features a segment where you need to navigate out of an enclosed space while trucks box you in and block your exits, similar to 'Caine's Compound' in Driver 2. The 'Bomb Truck' mission is near identical to the 'Stop the Truck' mission in Driver 2. 'Chase the Train' in Driver 3 and 'Train Pursuit' in Driver 2 also share similar ideas. And yet, there isn't one mission that involves racing against another car.

The story mode experience of Driver 3 is, for the most part, tiring and obnoxious. Most of these missions take forever to complete. They have checkpoints, but you are left to the mercy of the game whether or not you can save your progress, as giving up on a mission means you have to start it from the beginning once you play it again. This problem is further compounded by the game's crashing tendency, which can suddenly ruin any progress you've made in a mission up to the point. And so, while much of the negativity towards the game is attributed to its glitches, the true reason why this game hits the 5/10 mark consistently is because fundamentally, that Undercover mode just isn't fun. On the flipside, the free roam mode (titled 'take a ride') showcases all the fun parts of Driver 3. When you're no longer bound by mission constraints, these maps turn into a large game of exploration, littered with secrets. These include hidden cars, buildings you can explore, hidden areas, among other things.

Take a Ride lets you explore the cars and cities of Driver 3 with no limitations. And you can record everything into replay form! The ‘film director’ feature was also present in Driver 2, though Driver 3 opens a floodgate of possibilities of what can be done and saved for viewing purposes. You can park cars onto a drawbridge and then activate it with a button press, launching all of them in the process. You can park cars in front of an unstoppable trolley and find out what happens when it smashes into them. You can drive a semi-truck and smash into traffic cars, launching them into the ocean. You can equip a grenade launcher and proceed to blow up traffic cars to find out how high you can make them launch.

I never even mentioned that the cops that chase you have a physics defying 'boosting' mechanic that propels them into your car. If the terrain behind you is bumpy enough, it propels them over your car in a cartoonish fashion. If you want to see this action in full force, you need not look further than the 'Survival' mode in the 'driving games' category. In addition to this, the other driving games of the previous Driver games have returned. These involve driving through gates, hitting cones, or chasing down an AI car. These are the closest to a 'racing game' mode that this game has.

Not including the hidden kart race in Miami, of course.

Every Take a Ride level has a hidden objective to find and kill 10 'Timmy Vermicelli's who look suspiciously similar to GTA Vice City's Tommy Vercetti. He's even wearing floaties on his arms because ha ha, look who can't swim! Having to kill the Vice City protagonist 30 times is most likely a retaliation for GTA III's 'Two-Faced Tanner' mission, which directly parodies Tanner from Driver 2. The dialogue of ‘Two-Faced Tanner’ refers to Driver’s protagonist as "more or less useless out of his car", and Driver 3 couldn't have tried harder to disprove that Tanner is in fact not useless out of his car. It’s possibly why he spends so much of the game running around and shooting people. Yet, no matter how many people Tanner shot and killed, Reflections couldn't stop what was coming. 4 months after Driver 3 released, GTA San Andreas came to the PS2 and was praised as The Greatest Game Ever Made, blasting Reflections into irrelevance. The genre of open world driving games continued to advance without them. The Driver series would continue for a little bit longer, though today's respect for the series starts and ends with the outline it helped create. Considering how the modern world of video games revolves around the open world concept, getting credit for that outline is more than enough.