“How many times you gotta shoot someone?” – Driv3r

**Driv3r** (Reflections/Atari, PlayStation 2, 2004)

By 2004, the scene for British developers making third-person driving/shooting gangster games in vastly detailed cities was increasingly crowded. Rockstar’s 3D Grand Theft Auto games took the original Driver as a jumping-off point, but had far exceeded it in scope and popularity. Team Soho had demonstrated the potential of a more minimal, cinematic approach with The Getaway. For the Driver series’s big step up to the PS2, Reflections decided to go beyond the driving of the first two games and more completely join their rivals. They even had their new game start off in Miami, effectively the setting of Vice City, and their change in approach was indicative of a wider homogenisation that the mashing together of genres was promoting. Different games still bring their own perspectives though, and Driv3r stood out, even if it wasn’t always for the better.

When it came to shooting, developer Reflections were playing catch-up, and it shows. Driv3r introduces its new third person combat gameplay early, by having you travel to your police station and go to its firing range. Red, person-shaped targets pop out from behind objects before ducking down again if you don’t hit them in time. Duly trained, you can be let loose undercover on the streets. As preparation for the fights you will take part in throughout the game, though, it’s less than accurate. Most of your enemies won’t do anything as sophisticated as ducking behind a box.

It was during my attempts at a mission that involved planting bombs on a gangster’s yacht that the true absurdity fully hit me. You can climb most of the way up the stairs to the top deck of the yacht and position yourself so that you can see your enemies, and they don’t react. You can line up your gunsights on one of them — the symbol turns from white to red to indicate you are aiming at an enemy — and they don’t react. You can shoot them in the leg and they go on standing there. You can kill them and all of their colleagues go on standing there. You pick them off one by one and still they just stand there. Being below their eyesight level apparently makes you invisible and therefore invincible. (Try the bit of the yacht where you have to go downstairs and it’s another story, as you get filled with bullets before you get far enough down to aim at anyone.)

Technical issues are not isolated there. Driv3r doesn’t have the absurd excesses or range of options of Vice City’s version of Miami, but it is clearly trying to place itself in an open world space. Yet as soon as you try to do something as basic as getting off a speedboat, it’s all too easy to get stuck in a stuttering animation loop with your character fixed in place, probably until he falls off. When pressing L1 near the speedboat takes you instantly to driving it, it feels like a shortcut to get round animation failings rather than a convenience. When it comes to driving, at least, Reflections were on much safer ground. Driv3r’s best set-pieces feel like improved takes on their prior game Stuntman, partly a tech demo for Driv3r. When you hit the right missions you get a constant rush of windows to smash through and ramps to jump without the buzzkill of Stuntman’s overly exacting timing.

Outside of the fun of driving, the best and newest experiences of Driv3r largely come through a different approach to one of Grand Theft Auto’s big successes – its soundtrack. As you make that first journey to the police station, it’s to an ominous humming guitar loop which immediately put me in mind of the dense post-punk intensity of Interpol’s “NYC”. It’s not actually that song, but that’s a decent pointer to what Reflections were going for throughout — they made an exhaustive search for indie rock that would produce a certain atmosphere, commissioning their own where they had to. And it fits together perfectly with every vivid sunset, every trip through hazardous corridors, and every carefully detailed cinematic. The post-punk at the centre of its soundtrack is not my favourite subgenre of music, even if 18-year-old me is still in here somewhere getting deeply excited at a climactic moment being matched with the roar of an epic Hope of the States B-side. However just having such a clear vision for the music and how it can contribute to tone, executed well, elevates the undistinguished story and moments of cruising around alike.

Driv3r sold fast, but not for long as word of its barely-finished nature got around. That wasn’t a new story, although controversy over its limited advance reviews somehow ending up at the most positive end was a slightly different spin. The series never regained the same level of popularity, even if it would go on to produce the bizarre and brilliant Driver: San Francisco. Somehow, that all helps the couple of things it does exceptionally well to stand out even further. There’s something about the waste of dead-ends and unfulfilled potential that can, with the right tone, make the potential look brighter still.