Retro Throwback - Driver: San Francisco (Version tested: Xbox 360)

 

Once upon a time, Reflections were a development team who - arguably - predated the cinematic action of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 3 with their excellent "Driver" series, to varying degrees of success. The original "Driver" game on the PS1 brought us fantastic tail-slidey driving action and a series of missions, featuring the undercover cop Tanner and his mission to bring the underworld down from the inside using his elite driving skills. 

Driver 2 was OK, not perfect, and Driver: Parallel Lines was a bit of a shambolic mistake. Then there was Driver 3 (which was punishingly difficult and as glitchy as hell) so by the time Driver: San Francisco rolled around, most people had no faith that Reflections and their flagship game were worth worrying about any more. 

Oh my, how wrong can you be? Driver: San Francisco not only cocked a middle digit at Rockstar's rather insulting inference that "Tanner can't get out of his car" to literally build a game around something that even as I type it out sounds completely bonkers. 

In Driver: San Francisco, fans of weird after-life dramas like "Life on Mars", "Ashes to Ashes" and "Lost" will know where Reflections were headed with this tale of what happens after Tanner gets into a serious car accident - yet wakes up clad in his cool leather jacket at the wheel of his Dodge Challenger, ready to bring down nefarious underworld kingpin Charles Jericho. 

Things aren't quite what they seem though. For starters, Tanner accidentally realises that he now has the ability to have out-of-body experiences, allowing him to jump into other driver's bodies and take control of their rides. Lots of sleazy talk about leaping into the bodies of beautiful female drivers aside, this is about as gutsy a move to avoid skanky walk-modelling for your character as I've ever seen. But you know what? It works. It just works so well. 

With a quick jab of the A button, you're floating above San Francisco, viewing the streets and cars from above, and able to jump back down into someone else's shoes (and car of course!)

Wait, what? Why and how did anyone think this could be a great idea? 

As I said though, it just works - and not only that, the game also boasts some truly awesome car handling and physics with real-world car models to play around with. 

There are fab little side missions where Tanner follows other people's lives for a while, often helping them achieve specific goals (the sequence around a couple of teenage street racers is particularly notable, specially with the way it unfolds later on in the game as you start to understand exactly what IS going on with Tanner and his 'ability')

Tanner and his partner engage in some pretty funny 'bants'

Driver: San Francisco pelts along at a nice smooth framerate even given the kit it's running on. The cityscape and car models are also fantastic, leading you to wonder why on earth more people don't love the very bones of this game. 

Above all though it's that storyline that just sticks in the memory. It really was a risky move (and I'm not sure it's one that paid off when the game was released, I think people just thought it was utterly mental!) but this has remained one of my favourite driving games of all time (and still plays well, even to this day). 

Not to be missed. And (whisper) if you're into emulation stuff on the Steam Deck, this works perfectly on Xenia. Just make sure you keep it all legit, bro.