Driver: San Francisco (Singleplayer) Review

 DON'T GET THE PC VERSIONS OF THIS GAME AND ANY OTHER GAME BY UBISOFT. HERE'S WHY.

Driver: San Francisco is another big-publisher, actually-good game that not enough people played.

Don't let its obvious driving-based gameplay make you think, "Oh, another run-away from the police and racing game, yay whatever." This one's not derivative! How exactly? Well, for one thing, it features not-shit writing. It also has a silly story. It's about an actually-original protagonist who is a driver and in coma; most of the game you play in his coma dreams. In those dreams he gets the power to possess almost any other driver in his imagined San Francisco. The conversations he has with people riding shotgun are wonderfully awkward.


Contrast this plot scenario with that of most other racing games:

Illiterate Protagonist Male With Sexy Body: "I'm a special, underground car-driver who races on tracks and/or in the streets, yo!"

Antagonist: "I have stolen your fake money and your hot ass virtual woman!"

Protagonist: "I'm going to win at least twelve hours of races and maybe escape from police a bunch of times, eventually getting my stuff back in order to promote materialism; and then I'll be famous to imaginary people! Or, if there is no antagonist and nothing has been taken from me, I'm still going to become the best racer and promote materialism and narcissism!"

Driver: San Francisco promotes saving San Francisco from criminals, via vehicles, whilst in a coma. And the dialogue is quite good.

[Note: I played Driver: San Francisco in Spanish, and the characters spoke really fast, so don't take my word on the good-dialogue-ing without a grain of salt; in fact, don't take my review without a grain of salt.]

[Note: What does that even mean? "Take X with a grain of salt." I mean, salt is....salt. Seriously, I don't understand what I wrote.]

"How does the protagonist, named John, save S.F. whilst in a coma?" You ask. Well, that would mostly involve spoilers, but part of the answer lies in the game's not-famous "shift" mechanic. Basically how the mechanic works is, you zoom the camera out from your car with the right stick, you find another vehicle, and you press the "possess driver" button. You can zoom out really far to get an airplane's view of the city, and of course you can zoom back in so that you can actually see vehicles. It's fun dropping into vehicles and crashing them into others.

Just ignore the sidequests. They are basically more of what you'll be playing in the main story line. They are useless fat, and despite being that the game encourages you to play them. It encourages you in two ways: one, by not letting you listen to most of the game's fun, independent music while driving in the main quests; two, by rewarding you with fake money and new vehicles that you don't care about.

You can get the song list here and listen to them on YouTube.

And, unless you just feel that there's not enough DRM in your life, don't get the PC version (See first paragraph). The PC version lowers the frame rate after each CGI cinematic on my computer. This automatically means it will slow down on your computer, forcing you to restart the game now and then. It is Ubisoft's way of encouraging PC gamers not to play games too long in our bad-for-our-backs seating position, and it's annoying.