Gameplay

It's not my fault, it's the system!

In the game, you've got two bars; your ineptly-named "Felony" bar, which lets you know how pissed the cops are at you, sorta, and your damage bar, which lets you know how much more damage you can take. If the damage bar runs out, or your timer does (most missions are time-limited), you lose. The damage model is fairly simple; different collisions affect the bar (not your car, except in minute cosmetic ways that seem to happen when you turn too hard) to different degrees. Roughly speaking, you can survive about four or five head-on 100mph collissions with traffic going the other way before your car is wrecked.

Or you can flip your car. Generally not a problem except in hilly SanFran, where, as all SF residents know, catching a foot of air is a fact of life. Be careful not to start rolling, though, because once you've turned on your side, game over, man, game over! The physics model doesn't seem to account for your car rotating more than 180 degrees, so it's impossible to right yourself. Oops.

Grrr!

Taxi!

Rabid cops

Gameplay in Driver isn't meant to be complex; it's obviously a game designed to appeal to the testoserone-induced urge to drive like a maniac / member of the A-Team. Unfortunately, it doesn't even try to be sophisticated; the game is 100% contrived. Missions are time-limited so you have to drive crazy (even when there's no reason for them to be); traffic is designed expressly to screw you up (stop and watch the cars; they drive like cracked out zombies whose sole purpose is to fully block intersections), and the cops are, well, raving lunatics.

Not only do you have to be crawling for the cops not to head after you, but they have NO interest in pulling you over; all they try to do is ram you. That's right; if you pull over, they'll simply sit there and pound into your car repeatedly. What this all adds up to is that all gameplay is carefully set up to force you to drive too fast and to make it difficult not to crash into things. Once you learn how the game thinks, though, it's pretty trivial to outwit it, making whether or not you complete each mission dependant simply on chance encounters with solid objects.

Vwoomp!

Keep off the sidewalks