DRIV3R

Mar 22, 2005

We have left-field games like Katamari Damacy, with relatively low production values but great gameplay. Then there are beautiful games like DooM 3 that many found disappointing once they dug their gamer claws in. DRIV3R manages to fall into a third category, one where the initial impression is one of hip excitement, pulp cinema, and burnished presentation. Heavyweight voice actors, an intriguing introduction, and muscle cars sweeping through hairpin turns in exotic locations--what could possibly go wrong?

The problem with DRIV3R is that there appear to be two distinctly different entertainment experiences in the box (which contains a slim manual and no fewer than five CDs in paper sleeves shrink-wrapped together). One is an impressive meeting between Hollywood and the gaming age, and the other is an underwhelming, dated, and broken game barely salvaged from ignominy by what has always remained Reflection Interactive's calling card: cars and explosions. And, unfortunately, there isn't even enough of that to elevate the game above the mediocre, because the vehicle model is surrounded by a dizzyingly stale world.

Ostensibly, DRIV3R puts you in the cool cat shoes of FBI Agent Tanner, who's job, besides driving through exploding barrels at full speed, involves taking down criminals using as many bullets as possible. You'll have a pistol with infinite ammo for starts, and will be picking up silenced pistols, submachine guns, machine guns, rifles, shotguns, and other weapons of justice. Your starting point in Miami is a multi-million dollar home on the beach, complete with a souped-up muscle car you can bomb around in. Tanner is attached to the Miami police department but doesn't otherwise have legitimate means to explain away his impressive estate. And nobody really asks many questions of him. When he first works his way into the local crime ring, his key skill appears to be that of walking into one of the syndicate's torture rooms unannounced without getting his block blown clean off. Staring blandly while the hostage is plugged is also a nice touch. Tanner looks like an effective killer, but there doesn't appear to be much effort to get the audience to sympathize with anything other than his desire to kill as stylishly as possible.

So let's just leave the story behind at this point, because it's mostly a sinkhole of overcooked action movie clichés. The voice acting, performed primarily by Michael Madsen, Ving Rhames, Michelle Rodriguez, and Mickey Rourke, is fine work, but it's wasted on a threadbare tale. Let's move onto the actual game.

What you'll notice immediately is how bare everything looks. In the included 300MB "making of" video, they mention painstakingly populating the world with random items, but it steel feels bland. Not enough pedestrians, not a wide vehicle variety, not many points of interest, precious little reward for exploration, and an art style that doesn't seem to go anywhere in particular. The clipping plane is amazingly long, however. If you see a building a few miles off, you can drive to it. Unfortunately, texture popping, texture flashing, and geometry popping making the voyage unsightly, as well as the lack of world detail making it a little boring. For what it's worth, these problems were experienced on two GeForce 6800GTs and a clean install of latest official drivers. Taking a dip in Tanner's pool defines the visual bar of excellence in a nutshell. On a side note, the much ballyhooed particle system appears to have been stripped out completely. Vehicular impact typically produces a flurry of blackened pixels, and that's about it.

There's no in-game radio, and most of the vehicles have a shallow, grinding engine sound, and checkpoints are far apart, and it's all you can do sometimes to make it to what appears to be the next checkpoint. The vehicle sounds are about the worst I have heard in a vehicle-oriented game in years, particularly the motorcycles. When making my tedious way from point A to point B, I often turned the speakers off so I could concentrate on not getting a headache. There's some neat music in there, but it's spread a little thin.

In addition to underwhelming in-game presentation, other cars pop in and out less than a block away, not even at least fading out cleanly like in GTA3 (yes, I made it this long without the reference--please hold your applause until the end). You never really go fast enough for this to be dangerous, and the geometry that your car might actually hit is always there, unlike True Crime. But you will see parked cars appear in a bounced that says, "Hi, I just spawned here," further pushing the player from immersing themselves in an alternate world.

And, aggravatingly, Reflections made no attempt to address the problem of invincible light poles and trees that plagued the console versions. These things are a menace, particularly when you're being chased by the rabid police AI. Speaking of AI, police and geometry, sometimes it's possible to clip into someone you've just carjacked and technically run them over. And this will happen in front of a squad car, and all hell will break loose. Other times, the poor pathing will have Tanner running in place in the back or front of a car while trying to carjack it.

The less said about Tanner on foot in DRIV3R, the better, but since we're reviewing this and all…nothing appears to have been improved for the PC here, either. This segment of the game is laughably under-implemented, I'm sorry to say. For those of you who didn't get the memo last year, the AI has the intelligence of a can of Budweiser. Tactics typically involve standing in place and shooting, sliding one step to the side, and standing in place and shooting. It's a shooting gallery, only it's not really even fun on that score. There's little sense of bullet impact, the weapons don't feel or sound distinct, movement is awkward, woefully artificial triggers abound, and it's generally the most forgettable action experience I've had this year.

There was one point where I had to drive a car over to an associate, only I was quickly tailed by an especially suicidal driver. After getting eaten alive a few times, I drove up to the trigger point, stepped out of my car, shot the other guy's car up with an Uzi, and went peacefully on my way across town to the meeting point. The best thing DRIV3R does here is remind me how much I like the Max Payne and Hitman games, whose worst points were still better than what this game devolves into as soon as Captain Hotstuff steps out of his beefy car.

It was even worse, until I figured out how to remap the keys. By default, Tanner moves on foot with the WASD keys and looks around with mouse--simple enough. Oh, but he fires his weapon using the "5" key on the keypad. Playing with a laptop? Hmm, no gun for you, it looks like. My dual analog gamepad didn't have the mouselook equivalent mapped to one of the sticks, but that was easy enough to deal with.

If you get this game, the secret to getting the remapping to actually stick is to make your changes, exit that menu, then hit "Accept" on that screen. Hitting the fat "check" icon at the bottom of the key list does absolutely nothing. The vehicular operation choices were even more whacked: Z and X to turn left and right, the apostrophe key to accelerate, and the key below that to reverse. More serviceable than trying to shooting with the keypad, but why not just use WASD? I just used the game pad while in the car, and mouse and keyboard while on foot.

Speaking of shooting up cars, their breakability is apparently a big selling point. Bumpers drag, and tires, headlights, taillights, and windows can get shot out. They show a stream of bullet holes at one point in the "making of" video, but I couldn't figure out a way to recreate this fascinating phenomenon--pretty much the only thing that truly differentiates this destructibility model from what we've seen in a half-dozen other games by now.

To be honest, when it comes right down to it, I didn't even find the driving model compelling. It was at the extreme and of the arcade model, where taking a 90-degree turn at full speed is totally doable as long as you start early and tap the E-brake on your way through. I found the vehicles to also be incredibly bouncy. Take a ride on some rolling grass or across a sandbank, and you'll go launching into the air. I could have done the vehicle sections with one eye closed, but for the bloodthirsty car AI, which is cranked to a frenzy in some of the timewaster game modes outside of the main game. Even the GTA police (damn, there I go again) aren't this brutal--hammering viciously into your car until theirs explodes, pulling back just to ram into you again. The GTA police will do this to a certain extent, but their mission is to end your joyride, not to end you, unless you're on a street-corner rampage.

Throughout the entire play experience, I struggle to figure out what the appeal of this game is--what it has that no other game has. All of the production values appear to have been spent on exhaustive photographic research, the voice acting roster, and what was probably a princely sum to Ridley Scott for directing a television spot. Almost all of the much-touted style evaporates as soon as the introductory movie is over and we're met with stiff animation, blurry textures, popping geometry, a dated engine, underwhelming vehicle sound, a stale world, kryptonite light poles, bouncing parked cars, forgettable on-foot action and only passable vehicular dynamics.