Do you ever get curious about those bargain bin games that look interesting but are poorly reviewed? I am playing these games so you don't have to.
I played the original Driver way back when it was released so I took note of this when it first came out and proceeded not to buy it because it's a handheld exclusive from Ubisoft and thus likely to be a half-assed pile of dreck. I was right, of course, but couldn't resist picking this up for about a fiver from the webstore of a particularly prominent used games retailer.
The hell of it is Driver: Renegade 3D has the bones of a good game. It looks pretty decent. It's maybe a not a full step up from a DS game w/ its muddy textures and jagged edges all over the place but it's functional enough. The driving mechanics are damn solid too. It is basically on par w/ any arcade style driving game and while I wouldn't call the controls exceptional--they feel maybe a might bit twitchy on the 3DS analog stick--they certainly aren't broken. The music is fine if generic and about the same can be said about the sound in general. Overall, the presentation and gamplay here is passable at least.
The plot is kind of hilariously bad. It's camp but I can't really tell if it's intentional or not. It the kind of power fantasy where a man delivers justice w/o the frustrating shackles of due process or common decency, somewhere along the lines of Dirty Harry or Death Wish. It's delivered via minimally animated comic book style clip scenes, which is an economical but effective story telling means and I appreciate that. The voice acting is definitely not grade A but it seems they did at least hire actors rather than just getting people around the office to read the lines. Again, I'd classify the strorytelling as passable.
Where Renegade really breaks down is its maps and mission structure. For starters, this is strictly mission based and does not even have minimal open world elements like driving to start point of your next mission. That's actually fine by me--you get to go straight to the real action--but all the missions are on the same bland map.
It's set in New York City in theory but it's a New York City w/ less cars on the road than your average country highway. I get that replicating the actual traffic jam style of NYC driving in a game wouldn't exactly be fun but, really, if you want to have a game where you drive on roads where there's almost no other cars, just don't set it in NYC. I do kinda dig that you get to cross the bridge from Jersey to Manhattan to Brooklyn but the whole setting is so half baked,
Even this would be forgivable if the missions weren't just so repetitive. There's only twenty of them and they still get boring because they are all based on one of four concepts: follow a car to some pre designated space, follow a car and blow it up, blow up all the cars and smash through various items on the maps. The AI is nowhere near good enough to spice up these simple formulas and often times does ridiculous or gets stuck in corners meaning completing missions is frequently just based on getting lucky enough to have the AI do something really stupid that makes it easy for you to win. You do the same thing over and over, getting frustrated when things don't work out how you want and when you win, you know all you did was beat an idiotic AI so you don't get much satisfaction out of it.
This is not to say there aren't enjoyable moments to this game. The hammy story is good for some laughs and there's sections where the AI happens to be firing on all cylinders that bring some legit white-knuckle thrills. This game is not a total disaster by any means. It just seems like they built a decent engine, threw the assets of a dying franchise at it and just left that at that. Had they been inclined to put a little more effort into this, Ubisoft could have made a really great game and being as there was not much out for the 3DS in September 2011, it could have even been something of a hit. Oh well, I suppose it is safer to not to bet big money on new platforms and just put some garbage out there in the hopes it makes a buck or two.
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