Oh, Driver…how the mighty fall. After two amazing games, this is the overblown third game in the series. I had false hopes for Driver 3 (let's just call it that, and not dignify the idiotic 133tsp34k idea) even just the first time I saw the box. It depicts you, Tanner, sticking your arm out the window, holding a gun, shooting while driving. Well, you can shoot and drive, but not at the same time. Hmm.
Alright, well, I'll start with the graphics and sound as usual. The graphics are not terrible. Not the prettiest ever, but average graphics for a mid-gen game. And you can switch between third person and first person perspectives, which is slightly cool. The audio is probably the best aspect of the game. Great menu and cutscene music, good voice acting, ambiance, and being able to use custom soundtracks = yay. And if you absolutely have to get one disc with the name “DRIV3R” on it…get the soundtrack. Yes, it actually has a licensed soundtrack, in the form of a CD. No, it does not suck.
Gameplay is where it all falls apart. Driver 3 rips off every Grand Theft Auto game made (but wait, wasn't GTA like Driver 2?), but doesn't add anything new or even do it well. There's none of the non-serious, irreverent tone that makes GTA fun, and no new and fun minigames (the minigames were all new - ten years ago)…but there is, however, a lame story/adventure mode which holds no replay value and no side missions. There's also an inexcusable lack of variety…hundreds of cars out on the streets, with only about fifteen or so different types of cars out on the streets in each city, varying only in color. There are a few good cars though – you can drive boats (yay, playable water) and motorcycles. About the only mode that is enjoyable is the free roam/Take a Ride mode. Taking a ride is about the extent of the freedom though, as only a few select houses and places are open to exploration, and there's very little hidden to explore for – the game developers were so nice as to mark the aforementioned houses and places on the map.
Speaking of which, the locales are pretty nice, including, well, Nice. (Sorry for that. I can swear it won't happen again.) Miami returns from the first Driver, while adding two whole new environments: Nice, in France, and Istanbul, unlocked after completing two-thirds of the story.
The storyline, as mentioned before, is weak, really not that great…a couple fun missions are interspersed throughout the small mode, but mostly it's either super-easy, cookie cutter missions against hopelessly stupid AI, or incredibly difficult firefights with suped-up AI who are all excellent marksmen. It doesn't help that the enemies really only come in two or three character models. Also, a few bugs and glitches will normally make you redo at least one or two missions, and if you didn't like the mission the first time, you're not going to like the mission a second time. The one good part is that Tanner returns, from the past two Drivers. (Why didn't they have the creative brains behind this one for the first two games? We could've had Dr1ver.)
There's no multiplayer, which is also a big turn-off. At least the game is Live enabled, so you can see what your friends are doing and vice versa…but you may not want your friends to know that you're playing this.
All in all, if you want a sandbox game, there's no reason to not get something like San Andreas or Mercenaries instead. Driver 3 has its moments, but not consistently enough to recommend anything more than a weekend rental or borrowing it from a friend.