A Fun Bit Of Forgettable Fluff
I'll be honest: For the vast majority of the year since its announcement, Driver San Francisco was so far off my radar it might as well have been in a completely different hemisphere. Can you really blame me, though? The last two games in the franchise, Driv3r (I still throw up in my mouth a little every time I have to type that out) and Parallel Lines, were merely uninspired GTA ripoffs, and when word of this new entry's coma hallucination plot surfaced I simply assumed that developer Reflections had finally gone off the deep end. In a way, I suppose that's true. Tanner's latest tangle with the convicted cop-killer Jericho is by far the craziest thing that's come out of this franchise in, well, ever. But it's also the most unique, and if you can get past the looney story, or even better, actually get onboard with it, you'll find that the mechanics enabled by the strange plot can actually be incredibly satisfying.
Basically, Tanner is sent into a deep coma in the beginning of the game when chasing after an escaping Jericho. In his coma, Tanner believes that he is still in hot pursuit of the criminal, and uses every advantage at his disposal to hunt him down. These advantages include one startling new power, called Shift, which allows Tanner to transport himself into the bodies of the numerous civilians driving around the game's open world. This frankly jarring development manages to integrate itself into the story smoothly enough, with the characters serving as a great vessel for the player's doubts. None of the other characters believe in Tanner's powers at first, either, including his longtime partner Jones. Soon, however, all doubts are cast aside, and the hunt for Jericho is on. If you, like the characters, can so easily throw aside your doubts about the game's ridiculous plot, you'll find that it actually manages to extract a fair amount of interesting situations from this bizarre framework. Stop to think about the events unfolding in front of you for even a matter of seconds, though, and the whole thing unravels in a hundred different ways.
Still, I'd rather have a developer take a chance with an absurdist plot than rehash the same old action game tropes, and the ways in which the real world begin to blend with the coma world towards the end of the game can make for some genuinely interesting scenarios. I'll refrain from spoiling any of the specifics, but stupid as it can be, the game also takes some truly intriguing turns. The story is nothing overly contemplative or challenging, instead choosing to retain a lighthearted tone the whole way through, even when lives are on the line. It's a good choice for the game to laugh along with the audience, instead of trying to maintain the stony-faced seriousness of some of its peers.
It's just too bad that you'll have to wade through a bunch of side missions in order to see more of the main story. Each story mission is locked away until you complete at least two other missions, which typically follow Tanner as he attempts to help out civilians in need throughout the city. These missions are typically far less interesting than the story-based alternatives, and typically involve helping hapless street racers take first place and scaring informants into spilling the beans by driving dangerously. There are a few other permutations on mission objectives, such as a few that require you to lose the cops as they tail you, or even a few that actually encourage you to ram into more cops as you make your way towards your destination, but a lot of these boil down to normal racing.
Tanner can shift into other drivers, though, so normal racing in this game isn't exactly the vanilla point A to point B affair you'd expect from something like Forza. See, the actual driving mechanics in this game are less than satisfying. Cars feel oddly back-heavy and prone to fishtailing, which can make some of the missions incredibly frustrating when played as a normal racing game might be played. Instead, the satisfaction comes from shifting into oncoming traffic, barreling towards your opposition, and crashing headlong into them. When you shift out of your car, the AI will take over driving duties, so ideally you won't have to worry about losing your placing as you set up elaborate death traps along the road. I say ideally because the AI isn't exactly the most competent driver. There were numerous occasions when I'd shift out of my car, only to return finding it crashed in the middle of a road somewhere, or even in one particularly upsetting situation, driving in the opposite direction of my objective. Even worse were the times when I'd shift into oncoming traffic intending to ram my enemies, and instead the AI driver would steer Tanner's car directly into me, as if drawn magnetically towards my hurdling death trap.
These frustrating situations were thankfully in the minority, as typically the AI does a fine job of keeping up with everything. This only serves to make the glaring misbehaviors more disheartening. Coupled with controls which uncomfortably straddle the line between realistic and arcade, this can serve to make the actual driving a bit unsatisfying. Luckily, it's easy enough to smash your way through most of the missions and come out the other end with a big, dumb grin on your face. Many of the scenarios represented in the game are good for some fun, even if their respective story threads are pretty much inconsequential. The several missions that require more control than merely hurdling around the streets bouncing off of every obstacle can get quite annoying. Most of these come towards the end, and while a certain increase in difficulty is certainly expected at this point in a game, some of these missions just feel unfair. Again, it puts a damper on the simple fun inherent in shifting around the city.
If you get sick of the game's sometimes unfair campaign, there's always online play, and this is actually the best way to play the game. Shifting takes on a whole new meaning when it's not just you teleporting from car to car. Suddenly, every car on the street is a potential enemy, and every turn a potential death trap. As you play through match after match, new strategies and opportunities will naturally open themselves up to you, making progression in the multiplayer more about observing and learning than most modern games, which simply reward players with better equipment for better play time. It's a nice callback to an era of multiplayer games that actually required some growth on the player's part, not just on the part of the player's avatar.
Driver San Francisco can be a genuinely fun game, but a few months from now you probably won't even remember its campaign existed. It's a fun bit of fluff entertainment, but that's about all that can be said for it. Still, Reflections deserves some credit for taking such a madcap concept and running with it as far as it'll go. The real value in the game lies in its inventive multiplayer offerings, which really encourage you to think about driving in different ways. It's enough to distract from many of the campaign's little flaws, and while the end result is still a bit of a mixed bag, for multiplayer racers this is definitely a drive worth taking.
