And boy, howdy, is this game surprisingly fun. Oh, you’re in a high speed chase, chasing after a truck full of stolen goods and need to disable the vehicle? You could chase behind the truck, using the charge-and-ram mechanic over and over again a la Chase HQ…or you can quickly get the job done by shifting into a vehicle in oncoming traffic and hurl innocent vehicles at the getaway truck. And let me tell you, as many times as I did that, zipping into an eighteen wheeler and driving it head on into a speeding criminal’s car going the other direction never got old.
Speaking of getting old, despite the game only having a handful of mission types (race, pull off a stunt, chase a vehicle, flee a vehicle, etc), Ubisoft Reflections did a great job masking the same mission being played over and over again via the pre-mission banter between the two characters in the mission vehicle. Different part of town, different vehicles, and different characters all make things feel different. While you may run into the same characters every now and again, including a pair of Asian brothers who are street racing to get money for college tuition and end up in way over their heads, it’s amazing how a little bit of window dressing can make you forget you are, in essence, doing the same missions over and over again. Now, there are what seems to be over 150+ missions, so I imagine after about the 100th hour things might feel a little stale, but from my ten hours of racing around San Francisco everything felt fresh and unique.
Speedy Gonzalez
No qualms with the graphics or sounds: there was only one minor graphical hitch, but otherwise, there was no slowdown with gameplay. There’s no getting around seeing some weird graphical anomalies when cars can fly at you like they’re being tossed around like children’s toys, and sometimes you’ll see cars clip into the environment, but otherwise, you’ve got nothing to worry about there. A smooth sixty frames per second of racing goodness.
Crossing the Finish Line
Sure, Driver: San Francisco is trying to tell you a story, but damnit, the game is a surprising bag of mixed nuts of fun. Not since Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit have I had this much fun with a racing game, and the analogy that kept banging around in my head was that Driver: SF is the Saint’s Row 2 of racing games. I say that with all due respect, as Saint’s Row 2 went the silly route and focused on giving you side missions where you could hijack a Port-a-john truck and spray feces all over corporate offices or physically throw yourself into traffic in order to file bogus insurance claims. Despite being a simple six hour race from start to finish for the single player storyline missions with no way of increasing the difficulty, you completionists out there will still have plenty to do with the absurd number of side missions and online multiplayer modes there are.
What a pleasant and fun surprise Driver: San Francisco turned out to be.
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