Driver '76

"A passable free roam driving game, but when you have far superior alternatives, why bother?"

Driver was never about free roaming and on-foot action until Driv3r, after Grand Theft Auto made that sort of thing a huge hit. Ever since, Driver has been trying to steal some of that glory and Driver '76 is another example of this game development style.

Story
It's 1976, and you are put in the shoes of Ray, a street-smart getaway driver who's recently arrived in New York City. He's trying to get together with a mob boss's hot daughter by doing a variety of jobs to gain her father's favour. That's more or less the story in a nutshell, and the generic plot nicely plods along with some in-game cut scenes and comic-book styled movies that bookend the various chapters of the game's story.

Score: 5/10

Graphics
One thing Driver does have over GTA is visuals. Driver '76 models to entirety of New York City as opposed to the substantially smaller fictional cities in the GTA games. The city is incredibly detailed and load times are short, but the game has to constantly load the city ahead of you as you cruise around. The cars obviously look great. Whenever your car takes punishment, it truly looks painful - wheels and sheets of metal fly off, the front end gets squished, huge sparks fly as the metal scrapes along the asphalt...The same can't be said for the rest of the graphics. The character models and animations need a lot more work. Your character runs around like a dope, and the rest of his animations are exaggerated to the point where they're just downright hilarious. There's also a really awful frame rate in this game - it never slows to a crawl but it gets very difficult to control cars at high speeds as the game tries to load the city ahead of you.

Score: 7/10

Audio
Driver '76 is a pleasure to listen to. The voice acting is very much as you would expect it to be, and the dialogue is punctuated with period slang and rife with f-words, s-words and plenty more. The real stars of the audio department are the car sounds and the licensed tracks. Cars purr and rumble as you drive them, and there's a very satisfying screeching sound when you hit the breaks. The music features a ton of period hits by artists such as Marvin Gaye, Chuck Brown and Sir Mack Rice and it helps maintain the atmosphere that the map has created.

Score: 9/10

Gameplay
Driver '76, being a game about a wheelman, appropriately focuses the majority of its attention on driving. The same driving mechanics that have been around since the first game still remain, for better or for worse. Cars still handle like they're always driving on sand, so expect lots of loose and wide turns. You'll still need to obey traffic laws and the only way to lose the cops is to drive around until you ditch them. Probably the most annoying aspect, especially during high speed chases or during a street race, is that when you hit something head on your car comes to a full stop for about 3 to 5 seconds. It doesn't stop the game from being fun, since movie style driving physics have lots of awesome potential. You can jump ramps, fly through the air and roll your car over several times, and this never gets old. An extremely cool feature that I wish the PSP GTAs had is car customization: you can outfit your car with multiple body or hood paint jobs, bullet proof windows or tires, etc.

While the driving is, for the most part, solid, the on-foot action is simply terrible. Your character cannot jump or sprint. In fact, all he can do on-foot is either fire his gun or get back into a car. A few missions involve you taking out enemies on foot, but most of this time is spent in the car, which is a blessing. The on-foot targetting system is simply clunky. It's point, target and fire but somehow it's less satisfying and more frustrating than it was in GTA. Probably because the weapons are pretty terrible and the AI is always a better shot than you can ever be. Anyway, you can also manually aim but the sensitivity is way too high for this to be any useful. This same targetting system is also implemented for you to fire while driving, and it's no better there either.

The game is split into 3 portions: story mode, side mission mode and free roam mode. Story mode has you doing a variety of missions that mostly involve driving from point A to point B, usually having to avoid gang members, cops or both. Missions appropriately get longer and more difficult as you progress, but there's never really anything incredibly interesting going on with them. Side missions come in a variety of types: racing, bank robbery, taxi driving and car delivery are just a few of them. Doing missions rewards you with money and bonuses such as unlocked cars as well as weapons, so at least there's some incentive to performing these missions.

Lastly, there's free roam mode. In this mode, you can merely drive around in the car of your choice and explore the city. The city is pretty empty though - the streets are sparsely populated by NPCs and cars. New York has never seemed so dull and listless. Free roam mode's main draw is collecting 125 star-shaped tokens hidden around the city. For each token you get, you receive an unlockable item, which can be a car customization option, an item of clothing or a music track. Some of these items don't seem to do anything - I never found an option to change clothing, and a card with a tourist attraction on it hardly seems like it's worth the time to collect. Rampaging in free roam mode is pretty boring. Aside from the fact that the gunplay is boring as hell, the cops are also no fun to fight. They're very slow to respond and don't present much of a challenge. Of course, after you've killed enough cops you can try to shake them off, and you can do so temporarily, but they'll be on you again as soon as they see you again, no matter how long ago you got rid of them. The real clencher is that free roam mode ends as soon as you die, so that kind of saps all of the fun out of it.

There's quite a bit of game here, but the individual parts of it all add up to an average, not very satisfying game. The story is quite short, but most of the missions are bite-sized and perfect for portable gaming. The extra side jobs give the game considerable extra length, though. There's a multiplayer option, but I've never had the chance to try it.

Score: 6/10

Unless you really the Driver games, pick up GTA instead - it's far superior and definitely does the free roam thing right.

Summary
Pros
+ Impressive graphics
+ Great audio, esp. the licensed tracks
+ Solid driving mechanics
+ Very cool car customization
Cons
- Crap framerate
- Lame on-foot controls and shooting
- Predictable story
- Free roam sucks and story missions are "been there, done that"

Final Score: 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/15/08

Game Release: Driver '76 (US, 05/08/07)