
There, his mind conjures up the continued pursuit in the form of about twenty car crashes. The game’s protagonist, Tanner, crashes his car during a high-speed chase of convicted felon Jericho and is hospitalized. The best way I can possibly describe Driver: San Francisco is as a fusion of “Starsky and Hutch” and “The Fast and The Furious” with “Ghost Dad.” And maybe “Black Swan” mixed in there, as well. I’m pleased to report that my fears were for naught. The game’s title might as well have been “Driving and Walking.” Then came the god-awful third installment, Driv3r, which perhaps should have instead been known as “Driving and Walking and Sometimes Shooting Things Too.”Īs a fan of the original Driver, I went into Driver: San Francisco fearing that it would continue to desperately CPR an ancient franchise in the manner that its immediate predecessors had. Driver 2 was a lackluster effort that abandoned much of the tight driving in favor of sequences that forced the player to run around in a PSX-era sandbox. As these things so often go, though, the sequel was unable to deliver a similarly brilliant experience. It featured the perfect balance of realism and arcade-style driving mechanics. Aside from a balls-punchingly difficult tutorial with a time limit, the whole game was a total blast.

If it weren’t for Ubisoft's infuriating obsession with curbing piracy and secondhand sales by way of the terrible uPlay platform, I'd have given the game an even higher score than it already has."ĭriver is one of the first games I remember fixating upon as I played my older brother’s PlayStation system.

" Driver: San Francisco surprised me by showing how much life the series still has left.
