Reviews// Driver: San Francisco

In some missions, you have to use Shift mode to identify enemy locations, and move to them. But you cannot go between high levels of shift (zoomed out view of the game world) and lower levels while you are moving your reticule. And this can be frustrating.

The production design of the game is awesome, with each 'level' taking the form of an episode in an imaginary TV show. Each section of the game begins with a 'Previously on Driver' round-up/video montage that handily recaps the storyline for you if, like me, you skip every cutscene. And while this seems like a conceit at first, as the story develops, it becomes actually quite a clever and useful feature.

The flipside of this is that the slow but repetitive dripfeed of plotline made me begin to care about the game story, something I studiously try to avoid usually. But the payoff (and I'll avoid spoilers) just wasn't strong enough for my liking. Now usually, I would have not given a fig, because I'd have been ignoring the story all the way through the game. But since Ubisoft Reflections has cleverly managed to get my attention, I would have preferred a stronger denouement.

And the final disappointment was that the final two missions, the big ones where you take down the kingpins of the whole operation. They were just too easy to complete... I managed both of them on first attempt. Other missions, earlier in the game had been quite challenging, and up until the end of the preview code I was convinced that the difficulty curve was perfectly judged.

On the other hand, Driver looks lovely, plays beautifully and made me unable to eat, sleep or leave the TV for three straight days. Now it is almost completely finished, I feel oddly deflated, and the few remaining missions frustrate the hell out of me, given that I finished the main story so easily.

SPOnG Score 93%
I loved Driver. I love it still. It brings an innovative solution to the open-world driving game's biggest flaws. It offers a selection of compelling side-missions that not only add variety, but also dovetail nicely to the main story. It looks beautiful, and offers a HUGE gameworld. If not for the poorly judged difficulty levels in the closing minutes, it might be my favourite game of all time.