Driv3r: I'm done with it
Apparently the game went gold today, bugs and all, which means it'll definitely be out by the end of the month. Regardless, my torturous week with Driv3r is over. I shan't miss it one bit. It's a game of two halves; a perfectly adequate half, and a really shitty half - and part of me really wants to ruin the whole thing for you now just to spare you having to play the thing. The ending is awful. Che IM'd me this morning, utterly incredulous at the "reward" the game provided him at the end.
The design maladies plauge the game throughout the entire story mode, and is packed with ludicrously bad design choices. It really does play as though the team was rushed and had to get the thing finished, because some of it is just dumb. There are missions that are truly inspired, and there are missions that make no sense whatsoever. There are missions in which you have every weapon featured in the game, along with seemlingly limitless ammo, and there are later missions where you have a very limited supply for no adequately explained reason. There are missions that are inspired by movies, and there are missions inspired by the development team being crap at designing missions. The script never improves, in fact it gets worse as the game progresses, and the acting is appalling. I don't know how much of the reported $30 million budget went to Ving Rhames, Michael Madsen, Mickey Rourke, and Michelle Rodriguez, but however much it was, it was too much. Their performances are dreadful. They lack any kind of emotion, and by the end you really couldn't care less what happens to any of them. All that time, all that cash, and you are utterly detached from the entire experience. I'm sure Atari could have spent their money much more wisely, and it's clear that Reflections' ambitions for their project were competely out of whack with what they were actually capable of producing.
I'm sure when the review scores start to appear, Atari will be appropriately offended at how no one buys into their message for the game. This is a group of individuals that refers to the Driv3r website as "advertainment." How odious.
Fortunately, and I hope this doesn't give too much away, I don't think that we're likely to have to suffer another Driver game. At least not in the form that it currently takes. I'm sure there may be something to tie in with the movie, if it ever happens - but even that, I think, will be quite seperate from the timeline of the three games.
When the first Driver was released, I can remember it making me genuinely excited about the future of videogames. It was an incredible achievement on PS1 at the time, and was innovative and extremely fun. Driv3r epitomizes everything that's wrong with the games industry right now. The bloated budgets and pompous marketing, the lack of refinement, and the continued obsession with drawing similarities between gaming and Hollywood.
I have no idea if it will sell well. If it does, I guess maybe I wouldn't be so surprised. Think of it as a similar phenomenon as why people went to see the second two Matrix movies (and, I guess Atari's last interactive travesty, the big-selling-bad-game Enter the Matrix). It doesn't matter that some prodcutions are just plain bad, there are apparently thousands upon thousands of people that are blinded by marketing and consequently cheated into enduring crappy entertainment. With movies it's $10 and 2 hours of your life, with Driv3r it's $50 and as many hours as you're prepared to suffer it. 10? 20? More? Thank goodness that it's not just that awful story mode. If you're prepared to fool around in a fairly empty digital sandbox, you can play around with all the extra modes and make your own fun.
Atari is skating on thin ice with each passing mega-production, and at some point I fear they'll fall through. Enter the Matrix was an expensive and bad game, yet it sold far more than anyone expected. Driv3r is similarly expensive and similarly bad, and consequently just as risky.
