Previews// Driver: San Francisco Single-Player (pt1)

As a result we get a story-lead, mission-based, cop-themed, open-world driving game. A cocktail of Burnout Paradise shaken with Driver, add a splash of Speed and stir in some Starsky and Hutch. The action is pushed along by events in the main story. An ambitious escaped-convict-slash-criminal-mastermind themed affair that is altogether too convoluted to involve beat cops who drive around jive-talking in a seventies muscle car.

With its foreign assassins and chemical warfare aspects the case would fall straight to the feds and the NSA, maybe with a little intervention from Interpol. But this is someone's coma-dream inside a video game. So armed with a rapier wit, a gas guzzler and a bad attitude, Tanner and Jones (his swarthy sidekick) get the girl and kill the baddies. The girl in question is Leila Sharan (Volkswagen's Sister?), a crack shot and bad ass… ironically possessed of a very nice ass.

What the Banks/Life on Mars plagiarism enables is a central game mechanic that overcomes the limitations of the open-world mission-based driving genre, and these limitations were quite serious ones. While Burnout Paradise was an awesome game, as you approached completion you had finished most of the challenges, smashed all the signs, crashed all the gates, and all you had left were the three or four races that you found hardest.

And these were spread out across the massive map that had been one of the game's major selling points. But the end of each race was nowhere near its start, nor the start of one of the other uncompleted missions. So you found yourself schlepping back across the city time and again, bored and frustrated. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit got around this by enabling you to just choose a race from the map, and be instantly transported to the start - but that relegated it to a straight forward "series of races" style game, and made the open world aspect feel like a bit of an afterthought.

Driver: SF manages, through the inclusion of the frankly science-fiction coma mcguffin, to seamlessly integrate an open-world environment with jump-to-the-action gameplay. Because the whole game is taking place in coma-Tanner's damaged brain, he can control the whole environment, and anyone in it. OK, not anyone, or he'd just beam into the uber-villain's brain and have him walk into a police station pre-handcuffed and wearing an "I did it, Arrest me!" t-shirt. Tanner can't control the baddies - at least not the ones central to the plot.

But he can control the actions of the innocent bydrivers, the NPCs are all under his control. Not in some omnipotent God-mode sense that enables him to control all of them simultaneously, but in the way that he can project his consciousness into their heads one at a time, and take direct control their actions. Tanner can "become" almost any driver in the city. The aforementioned actions are inevitable driving actions… the "get out of the car and wander around" gameplay mechanic has been drop-kicked way into touch, as it surely deserves.

But get this - when you are chasing a baddie down the highway, you can "beam" into the brain of an oncoming driver, and get him to swerve his vehicle head on into the fugitive. It's genius. And it becomes central to certain of the game's missions. Even when it's not a requirement of a mission, it can be employed… one race I just could not win. So I just took out all of the opposing racers using oncoming vehicles… and took first (and second) place by default.

First and second. Some mistake surely, but no. That particular challenge required you to come first AND second in the race, something that could only be done by constantly switching between racers and guiding them into the lead before switching back to the other and advancing their standing too.


In case you missed the strap line - this is a big fat beast of a preview. Check back very soon for Part 2.