This is more of a rant than a review since I suck at writing. Sorry.
Driver is such a strange game, that I honestly don't know if I should be recommending to people today. I also have difficulty telling if I enjoyed the experience, or wasted more time just on being frustrated with it.
The game starts with a notorious """tutorial""" which already demands the player to be proficient enough at driving to even beat. It's a great tool for immersion, however: we ARE supposed to be playing as a really cool driver dude, who the gangsters would want to hire to do their getaways.
The rest of the game is still a mixed bag. On one hand, the driving physics are phenomenal. The cars are weighty and hard to keep on the road, which is exactly the designer's intent, since we are mostly driving around hunks of American metal and referencing 70s car chase movies along the way. However, the rest of the physics aren't exactly on the mark.
Collision physics, frankly, suck ass. Every time you find yourself ramming into a mission target car, you bounce off of it as if you're both driving bumper cars. It's especially visible if you crash into someone from the side: instead of ramming the poor bastard off the road, his course is unaffected, and you bounce off the road instead. This creates a very frustrating gameplay loop, since even affecting your targets feels like a pointless hassle. Why can't I do a cool cop maneuer, and spin the guy off the road? Or bump him onto traffic, destroying him in a head-on collision? Nope. Mission targets don't even take damage from traffic collisions!
But what truly frustrates me about the game is the cops. It's ridiculous how absoultely unhinged they are, and how unforgiving the game is with their spawns. Right off the bat, the cops are simply faster than you. Forget attempting to outrun them. Which is fine, since the game likes you outmaneuvering them by making them crash into traffic or road hazards like lamp poles or trees. What's not fine, is that cops are really good at making turns. Every time you turn (and all turns in the game are sharp 90 degrees), the cops will not lose any speed. And even if they will, the fact that they're so ridiculsly fast in the first place negates this completely. But what truly makes the cops broken are the spawns.
Every time you are on the road, ther cops will continue spawining under a fixed timer. They spawn in close proximity, be that on the road you're on, or somewhere on the side. You see, if you are on a highway or a bridge with no parallel streets and are currently in a chase, you're fucked. Every time you shake off a tail, a new cop will just spawn right next to you! And if you aren't it becomes an RNG chance of you randomly getting your balls busted anyway. What's worse, is that once you shake off your existing tail, the alarmed status will remain for some seconds, which means, that all the new cops which spawn during this time, will perfectly know your location anyway, again refusing your escape. Which is strange, snd makes no sense.
Those ridiculous rules made me start to want to avoid engaging with the police (i.e. playing the game) halfway through my playtrough, and I started to use a tactic which I call spawn-baiting: during non-alarmed status (but still with a felony), I started glueing my eyes to the minimap to see if any cop spawns on the road where I need to go. If some do, I simply... Do the opposite of what I'/m supposed to be doing as a cool and fast getaway driver, and reverse, until I see them despawn, and go where I needed to go. Repeat until mission finishes. Obviously, this won't work if you're on a timer, but hey, it's something.
Overall, I still think I enjoyed the game. It's definitly a really cool thing to see in a pre-GTAIII age. However, I wish some dedicated fan comes up with a patch of some sort to fix those issues.
And also, the last mission sucks.
Driver is such a strange game, that I honestly don't know if I should be recommending to people today. I also have difficulty telling if I enjoyed the experience, or wasted more time just on being frustrated with it.
The game starts with a notorious """tutorial""" which already demands the player to be proficient enough at driving to even beat. It's a great tool for immersion, however: we ARE supposed to be playing as a really cool driver dude, who the gangsters would want to hire to do their getaways.
The rest of the game is still a mixed bag. On one hand, the driving physics are phenomenal. The cars are weighty and hard to keep on the road, which is exactly the designer's intent, since we are mostly driving around hunks of American metal and referencing 70s car chase movies along the way. However, the rest of the physics aren't exactly on the mark.
Collision physics, frankly, suck ass. Every time you find yourself ramming into a mission target car, you bounce off of it as if you're both driving bumper cars. It's especially visible if you crash into someone from the side: instead of ramming the poor bastard off the road, his course is unaffected, and you bounce off the road instead. This creates a very frustrating gameplay loop, since even affecting your targets feels like a pointless hassle. Why can't I do a cool cop maneuer, and spin the guy off the road? Or bump him onto traffic, destroying him in a head-on collision? Nope. Mission targets don't even take damage from traffic collisions!
But what truly frustrates me about the game is the cops. It's ridiculous how absoultely unhinged they are, and how unforgiving the game is with their spawns. Right off the bat, the cops are simply faster than you. Forget attempting to outrun them. Which is fine, since the game likes you outmaneuvering them by making them crash into traffic or road hazards like lamp poles or trees. What's not fine, is that cops are really good at making turns. Every time you turn (and all turns in the game are sharp 90 degrees), the cops will not lose any speed. And even if they will, the fact that they're so ridiculsly fast in the first place negates this completely. But what truly makes the cops broken are the spawns.
Every time you are on the road, ther cops will continue spawining under a fixed timer. They spawn in close proximity, be that on the road you're on, or somewhere on the side. You see, if you are on a highway or a bridge with no parallel streets and are currently in a chase, you're fucked. Every time you shake off a tail, a new cop will just spawn right next to you! And if you aren't it becomes an RNG chance of you randomly getting your balls busted anyway. What's worse, is that once you shake off your existing tail, the alarmed status will remain for some seconds, which means, that all the new cops which spawn during this time, will perfectly know your location anyway, again refusing your escape. Which is strange, snd makes no sense.
Those ridiculous rules made me start to want to avoid engaging with the police (i.e. playing the game) halfway through my playtrough, and I started to use a tactic which I call spawn-baiting: during non-alarmed status (but still with a felony), I started glueing my eyes to the minimap to see if any cop spawns on the road where I need to go. If some do, I simply... Do the opposite of what I'/m supposed to be doing as a cool and fast getaway driver, and reverse, until I see them despawn, and go where I needed to go. Repeat until mission finishes. Obviously, this won't work if you're on a timer, but hey, it's something.
Overall, I still think I enjoyed the game. It's definitly a really cool thing to see in a pre-GTAIII age. However, I wish some dedicated fan comes up with a patch of some sort to fix those issues.
And also, the last mission sucks.