Mastery of the handbrake is required, but the cars are much more forgiving than in real life.Ĭomplex structure Single-player campaigns have shortened noticeably in recent years, but Driver San Francisco provides an unfashionably meaty experience, although the actual storyline is quite short and delivered in a rather bitty manner. Handling, as ever, is of the rear-wheel-drive, tail-out variety, although there's enough steering precision to weave through oncoming traffic (a key skill in the game). Its steep, jump-enabling roads have been augmented with toys such as car transporters that form mobile ramps.ĭriver San Francisco's cars also seem designed to bring out your most hooliganistic tendencies – American muscle cars, original and modern remakes, predominate, along with supercars – although the game's overall level of realism does extend to a variety of awful modern American family cars and endearing oddities such as the Alfa Mito and Fiat 500 Abarth. Its control-system works beautifully, pulling you out to a birds-eye view with two levels of zoom to allow swift sweeps across the city.Ī (mostly) realistic San Francisco has been meticulously recreated in the game, providing the ideal surroundings – it's surely the iconic city for any car chase aficionado. The ability to car-hop has spawned countless unusual multiplayer modes, such as vying with others to slipstream an AI-controlled car. Later on, you find missions like ensuring two drivers come first and second in a cross-city race, by flipping between the two cars. The result is that tortuously explained car-hopping mechanic, which brings a fresh new aspect to the well-worn driving game blueprint.Įarly missions include raising a driving instructor's heart-rate beyond 180bpm and terrifying a supercilious car salesman by racing the Ford GT he hopes to sell down San Francisco's famously twisty Lombard Street. Ubisoft picked it up after Driver: Parallel Lines, along with Newcastle developer Reflections Interactive, and gave the latter creative free rein. And it's an object-lesson in how to resurrect a franchise.

Driver San Francisco is an homage to movie car chases. If you think that sounds like the sort of preposterous premise that would set up some movie almost entirely constructed from car chases, you're on the right track. And he has developed the ability to drive any car in the city, essentially by possessing the drivers (who look the same but utter Tanner's wisecracks). Except, despite the evidence (police radio chatter, Tanner driving his own body to hospital in an ambulance), Tanner wakes up in his miraculously undamaged car, trusty sidekick Tobias Jones in the passenger seat.

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