Catching Criminals With a 440 Six-Pack
Driver: San Francisco is one of those games that will either become an addiction for most gamers, or it will make those gamers hate it for the innate weirdness of the setting and story. Thankfully, this weirdness is enough to draw the player in before the entertaining and slightly ridiculous gameplay take hold.
Driver: San Francisco starts with the series’ main protagonist, John Tanner, being part of a vicious car wreck with his nemesis, Charles Jericho, which results in him being in a coma. During this coma, Tanner is playing through an alternate reality of his mind where he is perfectly healthy and on the trail of the escaped Jericho. The main difference is the fact that Tanner can leave his body, hover about San Francisco, and “shift” to any car that he sees. The occupants of the car will see Tanner as the previous driver, so they won’t freak out – until Tanner jumps their car into the side of a building using a handy ramp.
As Tanner spends more time in the coma, he starts to experience stranger events in his alternate reality. Jericho starts showing up in random cars, Tanner hears the voice of his partner when he turns on the car radio, and many other unique events. This events add a uniquely entertaining aspect to the story because watching Tanner freak out can be quite fun. However, Tanner does use his newfound powers to help out the citizens of San Francisco by taking over their bodies and lending his driving skill to fix their predicaments.
The missions of Driver: San Francisco may not be the most varied, but they are still entertaining. Each portion of the story consists of a main story mission and a few side stories that must be completed before unlocking the next story mission. Many of these side missions involve winning street races, wrecking rival vehicles, or transporting another character while avoiding the police. One tense mission involved keeping a school bus above a certain speed in order to prevent a bomb from detonating (just like Speed). Driver: San Francisco does try to break up the amount of standard racing missions by adding protection missions that rely only on wrecking other cars to protect an armored van. These protection missions were entertaining at first, but the sheer amount did become a drag as the game progressed.
Luckily, Driver: San Francisco has an inordinate amount of side missions scattered around the Bay Area. These missions range from standard races to more ridiculous tasks like “run over 200 items in 60 seconds”. Completing these side missions will earn Tanner Willpower points that act as the currency and can be spent on new cars and upgrades. Some of the best side missions are small challenges that are based on popular car-related movies/television shows like The Cannonball Run or The Dukes of Hazzard. These tribute missions don’t allow Tanner to use his shift ability or boost, but they provide him with movie-specific cars and challenges.
Driver: San Francisco may seem like the standard racing game at first, but the unique story and gameplay aspects quickly prove this theory wrong. No other racing game will make the player want to drive a Dodge Neon instead of a Mustang, let alone recreate the chase scene from Bullitt in that Neon. Ubisoft Reflections had been struggling to recreate the success of Driver and Driver 2: The Wheelman is Back, and they were able to set a new standard of quality with Driver: San Francisco.
