Your first jobs involve acting as getaway driver for two-bit armed robbers - where you have to get to the pick-up to thieve and high-tail back to his lair without the Police escort - and debt collections for loan sharks - which have you tracking down target cars and persuading the occupants to flee leaving the shark's money. Right through the story, these and other side jobs are always scattered around, giving you the opportunity to earn a little cash. Following the storyline, as luck would have it, Ray hooks you up with Slink, a superfly club owner with a taste for hot women, hot cars and gun running. He needs a driver quickly, and proving your worth is the ticket to joining Slink's masterplan. From here on, the pace starts to pick up - possibly a little too quickly as one of these early jobs, where Slink has you collecting cash from other clubs, sees you pursued by gun-toting maniacs.
As you progress you're introduced to other members of Slink's gang; The Mexican, Bishop, Candy and head-honcho Corrigan. Jobs soon step up from delivery runs to more involved tasks, such as entering secured compounds to steal a car, rig it with explosives and return it. Another involves you corraling an escorted target car by planting and triggering explosives at specified intersections points, diverting it from the original route and picking off the escorts. This could easily have been a frustrating mission, as it's long and pretty easy to screw up. However, if you miss some of the key points the mission still continues, albeit with more enemies to gun down at the finale.
Crosstown traffic
Longer jobs are often broken into stages proving a restart at each stage, saving you from a good deal of tedium. And life-sapping tedium it would be, because the play area is large, massive even - stretching from Coney Island to Englewood. Ray's three garages, plus your apartment in Manhattan, are a Godsend. From these points you're able to relocate to any of the other within seconds - which is the longest you'll have to wait for anything to load from disk. Still, just like the real world, getting across town can be a real pain in the arse. Heavy traffic leaves you with four options; join the queue (as if!), look for an alternate route - probably down a garbage-filled alley, squeeze between lanes or take to the sidewalk. At first this is pretty frustrating, but as you start to get a feel for the handling of the cars, changing route and weaving become second nature. The streets are mostly arranged in grids, so perfecting the handbrake slide is key to fast cornering.
At times it seems as though there's actually too much traffic, especially when you're under the gun for time
and there are cars nose-to-tail in both directions. Typically a blip on the brake takes the edge off your speed so you can weave through traffic. Otherwise you're forced to take to the sidewalk. Don't expect any precognitive bystanders this time. Unlike the early games, where pedestrians were bestowed with eyes in the backs of their heads, these guys just fly through the air as you barrel down the pavement. You lose speed when you hit somebody, so weaving between pavement and the road is an essential skill. So long as you're going fast enough, hitting lamp posts and street furniture won't stop you dead - they'll snap off and slow you a little, but you'll no longer run the risk of ruining a job because of a mis-judged slide into an unseen post.
However, no matter how adept you become, getting around makes for hard work when you've got a job that's half way between your start points, something that could have been made more enjoyable with ramps over walls or water courses. Still, when you do get on a decent stretch of road, throwing those old, heavy 70s cars around is a great deal of fun; flying down alleys leaving a cloud of paper and garbage behind you, sliding into traffic and looking for the best route - all with the police in pursuit, is the kind of fun we haven't had since Driver on the PS1. When the story brings you to 2006, the modern cars are nippy and stick to the road like karts compared to their oversized predecessors. This doesn't mean they're no fun to drive, it's just a different, faster, more surgical kind of fun.
