PS3/Xbox 360/Wii/PC; £39.99; cert 12+; Ubisoft Reflections
Poor old John Tanner, the cop with the unparalleled wheelman skills, has been through an awful lot over the years. After an attention-grabbing PlayStation debut in 1999's Driver, he saw subsequent iterations of the franchise in which fronts decline in quality, mirroring the disintegration of then-publisher Infogrames/Atari.
By the time Driver: Parallel Lines arrived in 2006, Tanner had been dropped from his own starring vehicle. And now, his big comeback and first appearance on next-gen consoles, Driver San Francisco, begins with his old nemesis Charles Jericho hijacking his own prison transport van and driving it into the side of Tanner's classic Dodge Challenger R/T, leaving Tanner comatose in hospital.
Except, despite the evidence (police radio chatter, Tanner driving his own body to hospital in an ambulance), Tanner wakes up in his miraculously undamaged car, trusty sidekick Tobias Jones in the passenger seat. And he has developed the ability to drive any car in the city, essentially by possessing the drivers (who look the same but utter Tanner's wisecracks).
If you think that sounds like the sort of preposterous premise that would set up some movie almost entirely constructed from car chases, you're on the right track. Driver San Francisco is an homage to movie car chases. And it's an object-lesson in how to resurrect a franchise.
Ubisoft picked it up after Driver: Parallel Lines, along with Newcastle developer Reflections Interactive, and gave the latter creative free rein. The result is that tortuously explained car-hopping mechanic, which brings a fresh new aspect to the well-worn driving game blueprint.
Early missions include raising a driving instructor's heart-rate beyond 180bpm and terrifying a supercilious car salesman by racing the Ford GT he hopes to sell down San Francisco's famously twisty Lombard Street. Later on, you find missions like ensuring two drivers come first and second in a cross-city race, by flipping between the two cars.
The ability to car-hop has spawned countless unusual multiplayer modes, such as vying with others to slipstream an AI-controlled car. Its control-system works beautifully, pulling you out to a birds-eye view with two levels of zoom to allow swift sweeps across the city.
A (mostly) realistic San Francisco has been meticulously recreated in the game, providing the ideal surroundings – it's surely the iconic city for any car chase aficionado. Its steep, jump-enabling roads have been augmented with toys such as car transporters that form mobile ramps.
Driver San Francisco's cars also seem designed to bring out your most hooliganistic tendencies – American muscle cars, original and modern remakes, predominate, along with supercars – although the game's overall level of realism does extend to a variety of awful modern American family cars and endearing oddities such as the Alfa Mito and Fiat 500 Abarth.
Handling, as ever, is of the rear-wheel-drive, tail-out variety, although there's enough steering precision to weave through oncoming traffic (a key skill in the game). Mastery of the handbrake is required, but the cars are much more forgiving than in real life.
Complex structure Single-player campaigns have shortened noticeably in recent years, but Driver San Francisco provides an unfashionably meaty experience, although the actual storyline is quite short and delivered in a rather bitty manner. But there are vast numbers of various missions – including Dares, Pursuits, Races and Stunts – dotted around the city, and every story chapter opens a new part of San Francisco.
Plus, you can buy garages, where you can buy cars and upgrades to Tanner's abilities (his supernatural powers extend to a nitrous-style boost, whose duration and recharge speed can be upgraded, and a ram for battering enemies off the road). You can collect movie tokens (many in places only accessible by boost-jumping) and cash them in for special missions that re-enact San Francisco movie car-chase sequences. And your garages will earn money for you to spend (the currency is technically Willpower, or WP, representing Tanner's attempts to wake from his coma), so you can play at being a garage mogul if that floats your boat.
Ubisoft Reflections, as the developer is now called, has especially gone to town with the car-hopping mechanic online, coming up with a bewildering variety of multiplayer modes that use it to varying degrees of success. There are classic checkpoint races, though – we played one that put us on a dirt-track near the Presidio at the wheel of a fearsomely twitchy Group B Audi Quattro – tag modes and cops and robbers, where one person tries to escape a bunch of pursuers.
You'll have to try them to work out which suit, but more casual users should be able to find some sort of enjoyable multiplayer mode which isn't dominated by the hardcore online racing fraternity. While the likes of those Group B cars and McLaren's MP4-12c should keep the petrol-heads interested.
When the oil runs out and the joy of motoring fades from memory, things like Driver San Francisco will become revered artefacts. If you liked Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit or Burnout Paradise, you should be pretty happy with Driver San Francisco – it's at least as classily constructed, and the car-swapping mechanic plus glorious San Francisco setting (which is sufficiently populated to feel pretty lifelike) add a couple of interesting new directions for the genre.
It's not perfect – the storyline is a bit perfunctory, its free-form style can be illusory when it forces you to perform certain missions and it gets a bit repetitious in the latter stages. But it's a joyous sandbox in which you can drive like a lunatic, in exotic machinery that you might never even clap your eyes on in real life, without hurting anyone. Only video games can provide that experience, unless you're a movie stuntman.
• Driver San Francisco was reviewed on PlayStation 3
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/sep/01/driver-san-francisco-game-review
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