When news of its premise first emerged, it seemed developer Reflections had set itself on a course that was almost suicidal. Even now, five years on, it seems unbelievable that Driver: San Francisco ever saw the light of day.
It seems inconceivable that people of sane mind and body with millions of development money at their disposal sat in board rooms and all nodded sagely as the grand plan was laid out before them. Let's make a driving game where the hero spends almost the entirety of its running time in a coma!
Because why ever not. Because it is a brilliant idea, once you've got over how patently ridiculous it is. Here's an open world game where you're given unfettered freedom, where you have the ability to break loose of your corporeal confines and float dreamily above the city, picking and choosing whatever ride takes your fancy next. Partly it seemed like a neat excuse to sidestep previous Driver's notoriously ropey on-foot sections, but mostly it's about empowering the player in the most fantastical way.
Open world games like GTA are often at their most purely enjoyable when you fumble in a code to magically teleport a rocket launcher in your hands or a helicopter by your side.
Driver: San Francisco is an open world game where the greatest cheat code ever conceived is already unlocked by default; it's a sandbox that gives you the ultimate power from the off. It's no wonder that, five years on, Driver: San Francisco is the only game that can tear my niece and nephew away from Minecraft as they flit from car to car and chase each other across the city in the accompanying split-screen mode. Here's a game that encourages you to play with the unbounded imagination and diminished attention span of a child, tossing cars aside as you root around for whatever else is in the toybox.
What keeps you grounded is Driver: San Francisco's impeccable handling. It's deceptively light at first, but its approachability shouldn't be seen as signs of a lack of depth. Instead, Reflections took the cinematic dynamics of the original PlayStation Driver to their final form, delivering a world of heavy tail-ends and thick plumes of tire smoke billowing from wheel arches. Even today it stands as a high watermark for handling in open world games, its cars nudging you towards the lurid heroics that make any high-speed chase feel truly special.
There's an effortlessness to Driver: San Francisco which extends out well beyond its core. Driver San Francisco is the latest installment of the Driver series. The game takes place in the city of San Francisco inside Tanner's head while he is in coma. He discovers a new supernatural ability called ' Shift ', which enables him to take control of cars around San Francisco, which he uses to take down Jericho.
See also: Characters in Driver: San Francisco. The game takes place six months after the events of Driv3r. As the game opens, it is revealed that both John Tanner and Charles Jericho survived the shootout in Istanbul. In the game's introduction conversation between John Tanner and his partner, Tobias Jones , it is revealed that since then, both men have recovered and has been moved to San Francisco where he'll be imprisoned. Tanner follows him there alongside Jones, worried that a planned escape will unfold.
Jericho is shown being transported in the back of a prison truck, but manages to escape with help of hired assassin Leila Sharan , who hijacks a KEOC news chopper and fires an RPG at the convoy, and a vial of acid hidden within his mouth by a paid off guard.
He overpowers the guards, and hijacks the truck. Tanner and Jones witness this from Tanner's car, pursuing Jericho as he causes havoc on the streets of the city. Tanner ends up driving in front of Jericho in an alleyway, who rams Tanner's car into the path of a tractor trailer, resulting in a devastating crash which puts Tanner into a coma.
The majority of the game takes place in Tanner's coma. Whilst in a coma, Tanner soon discovers his ability to "shift" into another person's body, retaining his person, but, to everyone else, looking and sounding exactly the same as the person he has shifted into. Using this confusing power, Tanner helps some teenagers win street races to get money for college fees, aids some vigilante ex-cops remove fake medicine from circulation and lends his driving abilities to police officers hunting down criminals whilst trying to figure out Jericho's plan.
After deducing that Jericho is after the materials to create a cyanide gas bomb, he shifts into Ordell Williams , a low-time crook looking to rise up through Jericho's organization. Unfortunately for Tanner, he discovers that Jericho can also shift, and realizes that when he is not in his body, Jericho can take over.
He is deconspired, when disguised as Ordell, drives Leila to her target John Tanner. Eventually, Tanner realizes that he is in a dream world when the strange messages from the real world creep into his mind.
Jericho's powers become more potent, but as it is in Tanner's head, he is over-powered and defeated when Tanner assumes control of his mental projection of the city. In a mental visualization of a police interrogation room, Tanner begins questioning his mental projection of Jericho and realizes that the news reports from the television in his real-world hospital bed are feeding his coma dream. From this he knows of a real-world bomb plot, but deduces that it is not real - Jericho is a gangster, not a terrorist.
Finally waking up, Tanner requests his car keys from Jones, who reminds him of the truck that hit his Dodge Challenger. Leaving in Jones' Camaro and heading for downtown San Francisco, which is being evacuated due to a bomb threat, a massive cloud of gas erupts. Driving into it, Tanner finds escaping convicts, confirming his theory that it was not a real terror threat.
The 'bomb' was in fact a smokescreen. After a pursuit, Tanner sees Jericho head into the docks. Whilst at first appearing to be a game of chicken and a potential head-on collision, Jones appears in a police SUV and rams Jericho. Tanner claims that he knew what he was doing, but Jones reminds him whose car he was driving before suggesting a well-deserved beer. The fact that Jericho got T-boned, just like Tanner at the beginning of the game, and the song "Eye for an Eye" playing in the background, implies that Jericho was put into a coma.
The plot of the Wii version of Driver: San Francisco is a completely different and separate story, the story is a prequel to the original Driver: You Are the Wheelman. It features John Tanner as a rookie undercover cop. Tanner and Emilio Alvarez are chasing Solomon Caine when they get into a car crash. Alvarez is killed and Tanner goes undercover to find his killer.
He is accompanied by Tobias Jones, who Tanner dislikes at first. Tanner gains the trust of a gang run by Caine and does various jobs for him. He also ends up setting two rival gangs, the Dog Fish and the Dragon Ladies, up against each other to create a market for military-grade arms. All Rights Reserved.
Wii and the Wii logo are trademarks of Nintendo. Mac and the Mac logo are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Back Arrow Left Black arrow pointing left. Watch Trailer. Game Overview. Except, despite the evidence police radio chatter, Tanner driving his own body to hospital in an ambulance , Tanner wakes up in his miraculously undamaged car, trusty sidekick Tobias Jones in the passenger seat.
And he has developed the ability to drive any car in the city, essentially by possessing the drivers who look the same but utter Tanner's wisecracks. If you think that sounds like the sort of preposterous premise that would set up some movie almost entirely constructed from car chases, you're on the right track. Driver San Francisco is an homage to movie car chases. And it's an object-lesson in how to resurrect a franchise.
Ubisoft picked it up after Driver: Parallel Lines, along with Newcastle developer Reflections Interactive, and gave the latter creative free rein. The result is that tortuously explained car-hopping mechanic, which brings a fresh new aspect to the well-worn driving game blueprint.
Early missions include raising a driving instructor's heart-rate beyond bpm and terrifying a supercilious car salesman by racing the Ford GT he hopes to sell down San Francisco's famously twisty Lombard Street.
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