Driver: San Francisco Finished!
I went in and played through the rest of Driver: San Francisco the day after my last post. I have to say that the ending is one of the craziest endings I’ve ever seen. If the last post didn’t catch a person’s attention on this game, I hope this post will. I really enjoyed my time playing through this game and I wish a sequel could be made from this as I see some potentials for the developers to add more outrageous things.
Driver: San Francisco is a driving game similar to Burnout but with a story. Most of the game is in the main character Tanner’s coma. Events in the game are being played out by a news broadcast in real life. But the story isn’t really what this game is about. Honestly I didn’t really care for the story that much. All you really need to know is some terrorist name Jericho got you in the coma and you’re trying to figure out what he’s up to in the coma by putting the clues that you get from the news broadcast. Its your basic catching the bad guy 80’s flick story.
As I said, story is not the strong point in this game. The gameplay however excels at being a great driving game. Similar to Burnout, most missions involve you trying to take down enemy vehicles. However it is not really a race though there are some races in the game. What the game gives you to take these enemies down is by far the most unique thing about this game. The game call it the “Shift Mechanic.” Using the Shift Mechanic, the player is allow to shift into any vehicles in the game. The player can then use these vehicles to ram into enemy vehicles or create roadblocks if cops are chasing you. The game even encourage this by giving out hints saying you should be doing this. It allowed me to keep the game interesting by changing into different vehicles like buses or gas trucks and see what kind of chaos I can do to accomplish this mission.
The Shift Mechanic also allow for some real interesting mission. As stated in the previous post, shifting from one car to another to try to drive under a moving semi-truck to disable bombs all over the city is something I never done in the game. Another one which I don’t want to spoil but I really want to say is pretty much allowing the player to remote control a car while the player is still in the car. This mission really caught me by surprise as I had no idea what I had to do to accomplish it. Not all missions are as unique as the ones I say and some are just the basic take down certain enemies or run away from the cops. Even though these might be the usual missions that I have played before, I found myself wanting to play them due the amazing voice works done by voice actors. Each of the side missions have their own stories and some of them even continue on to other missions. There’s usually a passenger in the vehicle so they are usually talking throughout the mission and the dialogues are hilarious. Most of the passengers don’t know that Tanner is possessing the driver so you can see what kind of dialog the game offers.
Aside from the missions, there are a ton of cars to unlock. I didn’t unlocked them all but I unlocked the cars I wanted to drive around the city. Driving around the city is also a nice thing to do in the game. Being new to the San Francisco area recently, I still found myself catching locations that I remember seeing in real life. Once the game was over, I even drove around the city seeing if I could find places like IGN building or even just the AT&T ball park. Aside from unlockable cars, there are challenges and also movie challenges. The movie challenges are awesome but I’m disappointed that you have to collect 10 movie icons that are scattered across the map to unlock one movie challenge. In the challenge, you drive through a famous scene from a movie. A scene like the last driving scene from Gone in 60 Seconds (the old one) in the game is perfect and it was really enjoyable to play those scenes.
Driver: San Francisco is a really enjoyable game. I love the whole “Shift Mechanic” game feature and the way the developers worked out their side missions and main missions to be as interesting and diverse as possible. It is a really relaxing game with no worries of death and all gloomy-ness in the game world. I found myself really engaged in the game and I believe it is really worth playing. Heck I bought it for 12.99 so it is a steal if you can find it for that price!
The Gamer Inside 