Driver: San Francisco Review

These days you can break racing games into two categories: open world and closed track. Closed track titles are all about the car themselves, the realism, and authentic feel of each vehicle. Often the tracks themselves are taken from real world locations, or genuine settings in order to enhance the feeling of authenticity. Open world, or sandbox games, are a bit different. Missions are spread out through a city-wide track that all have racing oriented goals, and let the player familiarize themselves with the road in a way that a closed track often times cannot compete with. Driver: San Francisco is an open world game, so racing fans should already know that picking up a copy means getting ready for some city-wide exploring. What they might not be prepared for is the ability to spiritually disconnect from the car they're using in order to possess any other driver all over the city and use their car for your own needs. Interested? You should be.

Driver: San Francisco takes place shortly after the events of Driv3r (or Driver 3 for those that don't speak 1337), as players again follow the story of cop John Tanner and gangster Charles Jericho. Things take off fairly quick as a series of cutscenes catch new players up to the state of things, while series fans learn what's become of the pair. Executing a daring escape from prison, Jericho manages to hijack a police truck in a chase that eventually ends up with Tanner in the hospital, deep in a coma from his car accident injuries. From there players are given control of a John Tanner, not in the real world, but rather in the San Francisco in his mind. And to make things even stranger, he's still on the hunt for Jericho and not entirely aware of his real world hospitalized state.

The plot is already more interesting than most driving oriented games on the market, and it's made even more engaging through the way players take advantage of Tanner's comatose state. You see, Tanner is able to leave his body and possess others using a mechanic called Shifting. He can then assisting them with their car-oriented goals that range from street racing, to emergency deliveries, to helping local law enforcement take out in pursuit convicts. Possessing a car is easy to do and serves as both a fast way to get across the city, and a means for starting quests that will earn points used to unlock cars that can be used for challenges throughout the sandbox city. Unfortunately, for as handy as simply jumping from car to car is, there's also a little bit lost from hopping around at first as being forced to drive around for quests in a more traditional manner serves as a means for familiarizing players with the layout of world.

Thankfully Ubisoft tossed in two relatively helpful aspects to the single player campaign that help sort out some of the confusion. One of these elements is the map at the top of the screen which can be expanded with a simple button press. Expanding the map doesn't pause gameplay, but instead just shows players a further zoomed out view of where the player is, where the roads are and where objectives may be located. It's a quick and easy way for players to know where the best roads are without having committed to memory every single twist and turn, and it allows players to jump right into any mission without having to worry about memorizing all the best routes.