Interface

Dust out your wheel and rev your engines

In Driver, you've got the choice between controlling your car with either a wheel or the keyboard (yes, or a joystick. yes, or a gamepad). While using the keyboard is closer to the digital Playstation controller interface, we found a wheel made things a bit easier. Because of the fairly graceless handling of your car, it wasn't a big difference like in most racing games, but the little extra control it does afford you is a nice touch.

What also would've been a nice touch is for Reflections to work the bugs out of the controller set-up! Once you set your controller to "Joystick 1" (in this case, our steering wheel), it gives you a default button set-up utilising all ten buttons. Unfortunately, our wheel has six. Because you can't assign an action to a key (when in joystick mode), leave it unassigned, or assign it to an already-assigned button, you're stuck with the default set-up, and have no way of pressing buttons 7 through 10. Ahh, they couldn't have been that important . . .

Wham!

Zzzooom!

Put the pedal to the plastic

Driver's interface is fairly simple; there's accelerate, burnout (the same as accelerate except you peel rubber, and no, we don't understand it either), brake / reverse (it would've been nice to separate the two), turn, tight turn ("the same as turning the wheel all the way to the side," so presumably unnecessary when using one), and handbrake. There's an option for 'auto handbrake' which the manual says automatically invokes the handbrake to aid in turning. What it essentially allows for is better cornering at high speeds; leave it on.

Pulling the handbrake yourself is generally only necessary when executing a 180 degree turn; one of about ten tricks you're required to master before heading out into the field. Because you have to perform them in a small underground garage, around parked cars, and within the space of a minute, this can prove tricky. We feel this entire section would've been best left out entirely; the 'essential tricks' are simply a matter of learning what the computer wants to see. So, while it doesn't aid your driving skills, it does require an aggravating 30-60 minutes of practice for your average wheelman.

'Scuse me while I pass this guy

Don't try this at home