Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6646 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Atari
• Released on: 2004-06-25
• Rating: To Be Announced
• Platform: Xbox

Amazon.co.uk Review
The original Driver was one of the most popular and original driving games on the PSone and very much helped to pave the way for Grand Theft Auto III and others. The sequel, however, was a massive disappointment and seemed to prove that the Driver formula could only ever work again on the next generation of consoles.

Now finally Driver 3 (or DRIV3R as it insists on calling itself) is here, and although it's not the disaster that the last game was it's still a considerable disappointment. As you would expect from developers Reflections, who also did Stuntman and the original Destruction Derby, the car handling and physics are excellent--perhaps some of the best ever seen. However, the artificial intelligence of your opponent drivers is almost laughably poor and the incredibly detailed graphics, which look so good in the screenshots, come at the expensive of some disappointingly short draw distances, with buildings and backgrounds suddenly popping up as if out of nowhere.

The game itself is now very much influenced by Grand Theft Auto and you can get out of your car and hijack other vehicles. DRIV3R is still predominantly mission-based, though, and unfortunately the difficulty curve is still as frustratingly uneven as ever with some missions seemingly almost superhumanly hard.

If you're a fan of the series then DRIV3R probably won't disappoint too much, but newcomers to the series may find this has rather more problems than you'd expect from such a heavily hyped title.--David Jenkins

Manufacturer's Description
DRIV3R is an action-packed driving adventure game that stays true to its roots, incorporating the cinematic gameplay and gritty street crime of its predecessors with ground-breaking graphics and three mammoth, wide-open city environments: Miami, Nice, and Istanbul.Featuring Hollywood-caliber production values--with voice actors including Michael Madsen, Ving Rhames, Mickey Rourke and Michelle Rodriguez--and a gripping, narrative story line, DRIV3R casts players once again as undercover cop Tanner who, alongside his partner Tobias, must infiltrate a global car theft ring, an assignment that leads to tire-squealing chases and fierce on-foot firefights while tailing gangsters, chasing witnesses, stealing cars and unloading massive clips of ammo to bring the criminals to justice.

Customer Reviews

Lovely looking unplayable mess of a game
I was so looking forward to the release of this game, and yes I bought it without reading any reviews as the previous driver games were damn good fun, so Driver 3 being out on Xbox, should be awesome.....
Well, first go of the game, and the graphics looks great. I take my hat off to the pain staking task of the animators.
Then the gameplay starts and at first you got to give it a chance to get used to the controlling of the cars because thats driving games for you. After 20 minutes or so you realise your not going to get used to the controls as the cars are simply not designed to be driven, rather they are designed to frustrate the hell out of you by not handling at all and seem to crash into every little object available.I imagine its easier to get a matress and stick castor weels on it and you'd have more of a machine.As for the running around shooting enemies bit, I never thought an Xbox game would be so cheap and tacky to play.It simply isnt any fun and there's none of the thrills you get with the previous versions of driver.
Once again, we got game company greed destroying what should have been a fantastic gaming experience. Driver 3 could have been better than GTA but the gameplay doesnt even match playing poor demo disk games you get free with magazines.

The biggest disapointment of the year.
How can a game that had so much potential for being an excellent piece of entertainment turn out to leave you feeling empty and unterly disapointed. I'm sure many of you will be thinking this after the first 20 mins of playing DRIV3R, It's as if GTA's free roaming game play never exsisted. In honest truth there is only about 3 things actually worng with this game but these three things make the rest of a fairly well made game uterly frustrating. The first major problem is the On-foot sections, they are awkard, fidily and no fun at all. If this had been sorted out then actually it may have turned out to be a marginally better game than True Crime. The second problem is the very linear game-play, it can only be played from start to finish via one route. The third problem, albeit a very shallow one is that although the Car crashes and soundtrack are both of a good standard, it tends to suffer from a few graphical glitches and has a terrible draw distance, even for X-Box you tend not to be able to see oncoming cars until they are allmost ontop of you which makes frantic cars chases on the wrong side of the road to lose a tail much less fun than it should be. Shame really because with a Stunning Intro which is worthy of an oscar alone, a stella cast and a pretty good driving system this still can't avoid being tagged with the name "the game that could have been" if only more time had been spent on the problems the game had rather than the rush to release it, it could have been a very tasty game indeed. It's not awful but the disapointment is gutting.

Driv3r
Having enjoyed vast driving arenas from Midtown Madness and Midnight Club 2 I was looking forward to the release of Driv3r, combining extensive maps of Miami, Nice and Istanbul but also allowing for out-of-car action too. The pre-release screen shots look good so I foolishly bought it before reading any reviews. Big mistake! The maps themselves are extensive but the driving controls are too sensitive making the car hard to handle. The missions themselves are fairly linear (drive from A to B etc.) with high-quality cut scenes to give the game a movie feel, but its the out-of-car action that really lets the game down. The main character is poorly animated and the weapon controls are hard to control. The enemy AI is pretty poor too. The game has also crashed on several occasions and at times. The fim editor allows you to edit your missions using camera placement and special effects which is great fun but only allows for limited cameras preventing you from editing more than a few minutes of your mission before running out of cameras. All in all, a real disappointment giving a sense of a rushed release and not what I would expect for such a powerful console.