I didn’t understand the plot at all. That’s not really why I played Driv3r anyway, but it certainly adds to the messiness I felt. No compelling characters, or dialogue, or intrigue. Or anything. It makes you wonder what could’ve been, had the game not been rushed out the door several months early.
That isn’t to say that I walked away completely unimpressed. The cars, thankfully, are excellent. You get a real sense of disaster when they explode — a grand eruption of metal, pieces flying everywhere, the chassis of the vehicle literally blown in half, the world littered with the charred remains of what once was. The strange dichotomy here, of course, is that the world is so damn empty that the exploded car parts become the most interesting part of it.
There’s a strange hollowness to be had; stiff animations, stiff dialogue, stiff presentation — there’s no exciting fanfare when you complete a mission, for example. Often you are greeted with an extremely brief cutscene followed by a total halt of the action as a dialogue box pops up. No celebratory music jingle, no victory dance, nothing memorable at all. Players of previous games in the Driver franchise will also recognize many reused engine noises and tire screeches, which all adds up to the game feeling oddly dead. Unfinished, even; perhaps because it is.