Price: £44.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes 60Hz: No Dolby Digital 5.1 sound: Yes Xbox Live-enabled: Yes (not multiplayer) The first thing that struck me about Driv3r was that it contained great stuff to drive about like the GTA series, and, likewise, choosing your own soundtrack and vehicles, including flash race cars, speedboats, motorbikes, trucks and a bus! Sadly, I wasn't allowed to head straight into a lamp-post as that did tend to stop me. However, at least you can swim this time when you go in the water! In addition, this game series has enjoyed a good reputation. Although I didn't play the last game, I did go headlong into the original Driver the PSX and hugely enjoyed careering up and down the San Francisco hilly streets.

Looking at the basics here, the options begin with Driving games "Chase" and "Getaway". These are fairly obvious - Just keep on the trail of the enemy, or escape from the cops, although in the former case I don't see why the enemy has to just slightly get out of distance before it's game over. Hit one car on the way and you're stuck and it's too late to catch up. For Trailblazer, hit 100 cones before the short timer runs out (increasing every time you hit one), or before you car dies from a broken engine; In Survival, there's a robbery in progress - and you've just done it! Try and escape the cops, before they smash you to pieces; Checkpoint Race is self-explanatory; and Gate Race is the same as Trailblazer, except you drive inbetween two cones acting as 'gates'. And then we're into the game proper with the Undercover mode, playing as Tanner and starting off against Baccus, and heading through the locations Miami, Nice and Istanbul (not Constantinople).

Graphics are nothing less than outstanding, and I like the way I can use the right-stick to view all around me, which brightens up otherwise dull straight racing across the water to get to part of a level. It's a game that has far more fluid movement than the lacklustre and overhyped True Crime: Streets of L.A. when it comes to driving, but as you walk around your character does feel like he's got some sort of medical problem because it's rather stilted. In fact, run about and he definitely looks like he's desperate for a laxative. One disadvantage I noticed at this point - why can't I crouch AND move at the same time? I want to move into position to shoot the baddies and it won't let me. Also, as you crouch and turn around, any walls behind you cover the 3rd-person camera and make it impossible to see what you're doing. Some more intuitive behaivour could be incorporated as well, such as when I leap from a boat to the quay, I do NOT want to fall into the water. Ok, so unlike the GTA games, Tanner can actually swim, but it's an unwelcome 'feature' that could've been fixed. In fact, it's moving about in general when on foot that makes for completing the mission parts of the game as a real pain and not a fun challenge. If I keep walking into a bar and getting murdered while I'm trying to shoot everyone to complete that mission, just to fail most times by being hit while turning round slightly to get an accurate shot, even even then the baddies aren't trying to run away, then it's a rather poor do. Also, while there are no audio problems deviating from the driving/shooting SFX you expect, if I could change one thing soundwise, it's that when choosing a soundtrack, I pick one of the albums on the hard drive, and unlike, say, Midtown Madness 3 or Project Gotham Racing 2, it doesn't select a random track, it just starts from the beginning each time.

When it comes to the Xbox Live content, you can view other people's gameclips but can't play against others online, alas. I've created several gameclips already and uploaded them, although you can't search by type for downloading so the ones you make are bound to get lost amongst them all as the list online is sorted by 'most recently uploaded'. However, done right, you can achieve fantastic-looking stunt clips, particularly by positioning a static camera anywhere, but the auto-director feature also does a good job - and if you don't like one of its angles, just change it. If I had two complaints, it would be a rewind button to go with the fast-forward, since if you just miss an angle you want to alter, you'll have to go back to the start and FFWD to the chosen moment, and also, you only get a rather short time to edit. Given that the Xbox has a massive hard drive, you should be allowed to edit clips for several minutes more. All that said, and if you can get past the on-foot control problems, one thing this release really needed was... Xbox Live online play. It's not there, and that means there will be those who instead go for Midtown Madness 3. When it comes to the driving, I think it'll appeal to those who enjoyed Project Gotham Racing 2, but want something with more of an arcade-like feel. The replay feature is a massive bonus, as is being able to upload them and see other people's replays.

Just a few weeks after I put this review online originally, a lot of heavy playing of this game has finally resulted in completion. Overall, while the driving scenes were outstanding, and ones from which the GTA series could learn from when 'San Andreas' gets a release on the Xbox, the on-foot sections never stopped being a royal pain. I thoroughly enjoyed playing Driv3r though, and while one of the most fun levels was Tanner Escapes (in Istanbul), requiring you to constantly fire grenades at approaching police cars and sending them flying in all kinds of directions, there was more of a challenge in all the sections of Booby Trap, involving driving a car that had to be kept over 50mph (so, rather like the movie Speed, but at least once you dropped below that limit you still had a second or two to speed up to compensate for this. Most annoying, though, were Rescue Dubois, one of the 'chase' levels in which it was a real bastard to catch up with the car carrying Dubois and for which it took forever, and then a very similar level in the last but two ventures, The Chase, when you had to catch Calita. It was just fucking impossible the way she tore round tight bends while you had a piece-of-shit car to drive in, so I bit the bullet after several attempts and used the help of Gamefaqs.com to get past that stage, as well as judging my performance from the walkthroughs. I'll look forward to the fourth installment and will keep playing the basic game for kicks, but I hope they fix the walking sections so Tanner doesn't look like he's wearing tight pants!

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2004.