Played on:
PSP
Another year, another set of Grand Theft Auto clones. Sometimes I wonder how so few companies have been able to recreate the fun and atmosphere of GTA, but after playing Driver 76 on the Sony PSP, I think I understand why.
Driver 76 is another attempt from Atari to bring the faltering Driver franchise back to life. Exclusively for the PSP, this one takes a couple of side characters from Driver: Parallel Lines and puts them in a prequel that stays squarely in the year 1976 (as opposed to the 20-year jump that happened in Parallel Lines). You'll play as mechanic Ray and will be taking missions from your buddy, the pimpalicious Slink. Ray's got the hots for the daughter of the local Chinese Triad boss, and so you'll need to make money and improve your stature in the criminal underground to impress him.
The way that Driver 76plays is that you'll be choosing your missions from a map of New York and a bit of New Jersey. While you can certainly choose a mission and then drive around all you want, the game does work off of the map; when you finish a mission, you go back to the map. Fail it, back to the map. This induces some fairly nasty load times which can get frustrating after a while, and the game still manages to include some load times during the game which really add up as well.
From a technical perspective, it's certainly worth it, though. Driver 76 shows a pretty interesting rendition of New York with great lighting, decent car deformation when you crash into stuff, and while the amount of traffic isn't really a lot when compared to something like GTA: San Andreas on the PS2, it's a respectable amount for the PSP. Cars handle uniquely and there's a good range here, from the requisite variety of muscle cars (this is 1976, after all) to vans and little, fast sports cars as well.
But how you get those cars is definitely not something that's the norm in theaction/driving genre. In Driver 76, you unlock cars (and guns) by finishing missions and when you take on another mission, you get to select a car. Sure, once you get onto the streets you can jump out and carjack someone else's vehicle at any time, but with as many timer-based missions as there are here, it's not really the smartest idea. And the money you make from missions doesn't go into buying new weapons or improving your character, but into improving your cars as well. Unlike most games like this, your cars magically appear back at home in perfect condition whenever you crash or ditch them, so when you give your car that custom paint job or other bits and pieces, the changes do stick from one mission to the next.
Most of the missions you take on are fairly short and have been seen plenty of times before. Hijack a van with stolen goods, find some guy and ram his car or kill him, complete a race, all that stuff is here. Sure, you can shoot out of your car, but since the auto-aim is on in full force, it's not really challenging or rewarding. Same goes with shooting when you're on foot - sure, it's there, but it's just not really any fun.
As you gain respect and finish missions you'll uncover a plot that at the least is a little more down to earth and realistic than we've seen in some games. Sure, it's not as crazy (and sometimes, not as fun) as we've seen before, but at least it's got the advantage of being somewhat believable. What is disappointing, however, is that the story doesn't last more than about five or six hours. The presentation is great and I enjoyed the voice acting and excellent selection of disco and funk music, but with such a short play time, even the best parts of the game really didn't amount to much. Sure, you can go around and collect the stars littered throughout the city to unlock a bunch of useless stuff or even do side missions to make money (which doesn't really let you buy much), but it just doesn't add up to anything I'd really want to continue playing this game for.
The multiplayer modes are more of the same. There are four competitive games you can play via Ad-hoc wireless, but the only decent one is the racing. And it's pretty good racing since the car handling works just as well over a wireless connection as it does when playing alone, but we can add yet another game to the massive pile of titles that don't support online play via the PSP.
I think that the Driver franchise is no win some real trouble. Atari and Reflections Entertainment seem to be unable to break out of a mold that was set when the series first tried to differentiate itself from Grand Theft Auto way back ten years ago. They seemed to want to separate their game by focusing on the driving aspects, but nowadays that focus is serving more as a limitation. If the developers can rework the gameplay to keep plenty of driving in while giving you more things to do than whatDriver 76 does, then maybe this franchise has a hope of some real success in the future.
Driver 76 delivers some damn good visuals for the PSP and some fun thrills every once in a while, but this is mostly a play-by-the-numbers action game. The limited amount of driving and action seems to go hand-in-hand with the slightly more conservative story, but it also drains some of the fun as well. The added missions and things to do are just not enough to excuse the short campaign, and the multiplayer feels just as tacked on as it does in many PSP games. Skip this one unless you just have to drive to some funk music.
