Game Review Driver:San Francisco

Finally after a long wait, the once awesome “Driver” series can say it is no longer a has been. “Driver: San Francisco,” the latest title to emerge in the series, is polished, visually stunning and loaded with a plethora of arcade racing mission and mode types. Not only are the graphics excellent, and the game play satisfying, but there’s a storyline running under it all and it’s pretty compelling, which might surprise you in a car racing game. You start out as John Tanner, and you are in a coma. Strangely, your comatose state gives you the uncanny ability to not only observe San Franciscans’ activity from bird’s-eye view, but get behind the eyes of any driver on the road and assume control over his or her body and car. D:SF’s love for polished interfaces makes this process of shifting perspectives a breeze to use. A single button press shifts out of body and atop a city map, and shifting into another body is as easy as highlighting a vehicle and pressing the same button once again. This game prioritizes fun over everything else. This means that outside of special challenges that test your driving skills alone, you can shift whenever, wherever and as many times as you feel like it. From the start, shifting is fun since it allows you to drive from a huge variety of different vehicles and hop into the thoughts of numerous sideline and important characters. The storyline comes across somewhat like a weekly police drama, and leverages good character development, excellent voice acting and some surprisingly witty humor to comprise a game that is full of action, great storylines, and hours of fun. Eventually though, you’ll find your way accidentally into something that brings the shifting person’s true potential to your attention. You might be in the body of a police officer forced to take out four street racers alone, which is a task easier to do if you make multiple shifts in and out of nearby traffic to help form a kind of roadblock to stop the illegal racers. This is one of those real-time racing and strategy games that only comes along once in a long while and you won’t want to miss it. With a tightly knit storyline and great player abilities, you’ll want to try hundreds of different strategy combinations until you find just the one you like using the best. Driver: San Francisco brings it all back.