Preview: Driver 4

• Manager
• Tuesday, January 31, 2006 | 9:45 PM
• 17 comments

PS2 Xbox

Xboxyde got invited to Stockholm to play one of the last titles on the old Xbox: Driver Parallel Lines. And even though the Xbox barely catches anyone's interest after the X360 release, Driver 4 can become a reason to pull out the old machine from your closet.

The graphics won't disappoint anyone, considering the Xbox's older components. The cars look very detailed and as heavy, "cool" and steady as all the cars do in the Driver-series. You have your own place where you can "pimp" your ride, by adding things like bulletproof glas and tyres. You can also paint the car and modify the engine among other things - nothing super spectacular, but it's a way of adding a little bit of personality to your own rides.
The framerate is great, without any particular framedrops. The thing that really impressed me was all the small objects hurling around on the screen - garbage and other things, which all flew up back of the car when you ran over them. Developers producing in the same genre on Xbox 360 has really taken this a further step, but it felt like this is as far as you can go on the Xbox.

For those who hated getting out of the car in Driv3r, I can tell you something good: 90% is supposed to be based on in-car mission, while you're on foot for the rest of the 10%. The foot part seems more thought as a way to change between cars, really. You can use guns while driving the car, with the option to use a manual aim or an autoaim, where you simple choose between different targets by pushing a button. During the presentation, we were shown how you can take out a very powerful weapon, steal a fast car and just drive in 200 km/h and blow cars up - without any noticable framedrops.

The city is gigantic. As many of you probably have read, the story is based during both the 70's and the year 2006. You're walking around as a cocky 18-year-old in 1976, with a dirty style and a huge ego. The cars are up-to-date, the city is filthy and the affro is as popular as it was back then in-real-life. When you're getting out of jail 28 years later, everything's changed - New York has developed into a modern city, the clothes are changed and new cars are added. Oh, and there's no loading times what-so-ever. You can drive through the whole city without any stops.

The game consist of around 35 main missions. You can also challenge other cars on the race track whenever you want, and there are also other minigames to chose from. The choice of doing your own thing was a feature which the developers were sure to hype - you can cancel a mission whenever you want and just drive around, or retry it if you want. It's your choice, and the missions are not supposed to stop you from doing whatever you want. You can really tell that they've spent alot of time debugging the game and adjusting it, as the menus (with an interactive map) are flexible and that the city really seems to be worked out thoroughly. And they now have around two months to put together the last missing pieces.

Below you'll find three videos of the game. I couldn't get any good video camera for it, so the quality isn't the best (even though it's hard to succeed on a 4:3 SDTV). Just remember that the videos are in 15 fps. The third video is a trailer which Atari recently released.

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Gameplay (No sound)

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Gameplay 2 (Bad focus No sound)

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Car Crashes trailer