You had to be there. Back in 2004, people were actually hyping Driv3r as the true Grand Theft Auto killer. It was the Blur x Oasis of that year, with magazines constantly previewing it alongside San Andreas, wondering which game would eventually end up being the superior criminal sandbox simulator. And yeah, we were pretty damn dumb back then to even consider giving a game like Driv3r the benefit of the doubt. But remember, all we had in order to hype ourselves up before the release of a game were magazine articles and pictures. No YouTube, no demos for it, no nothing. As a still picture, Driv3r looked like it was going to be promising.

Truth be told, Driv3r looks impressive from a graphical standpoint. It just fails at everything else.

Remember one thing: the GTA games didn’t exactly look impressive even back in the early 2000s. Vice City looked blocky and blurry as hell. Character models from San Andreas were already quite visually dated even for 2004 standards. When Driv3r first showed up in magazines, it looked like a proper competitor. It looked great. It was going to feature three real-life cities to explore. Finally, it was, well, a Driver game. Back then, a sequel to one of the titles that inspired GTA to begin with was worth the hype.

Suffice to say, twenty years later, we all know what happened in 2004: San Andreas came out, became the greatest game of that generation (c’mon, you know it’s true), and Driv3r flopped horrendously. How bad was it? Let’s just say that, even back in ’05, a twelve year old me playing it on an Xbox knew there was something wrong with it. In 2024, a thrity-one year old me can safely say it is total and utter crap, possibly one of the worst games to be released during that generation, and certainly one of the most disappointing.

We used to hype this game up because it was going to feature a bigger Miami than GTA’s own Vice City. We were dumb back then.

So what went wrong? Can we blame it on how young and unproven the genre was at the time? I don’t know if we can say that. True Crime: Streets of LA came out before Driv3r and controlled fine enough. There was The Getaway. LucasArts’ Mercenaries would drop a few months later, and it controlled like a dream. Freaking The Simpsons: Hit and Run. Driv3r fumbled because of its torrid controls and physics, even though other “GTA clones” of the time didn’t share the same issues. Maybe the game took too long to be developed? Maybe Reflections (the developer behind it) was only comfortable at making driving games, and not something that required you to get out of said vehicle and act like a cop? Given how later Driver games proceeded to ditch on-foot exploration altogether, that might have been the case.

Not even the fact you play as someone voiced by Michael Madsen makes Driv3r pleasant to play. Driving cars was stiff, but something you could get used to (I mean, we all did once GTA IV dropped). The problem lied with Driv3r insisting on making us step the hell out of a vehicle and shoot at thugs. Those controls… they ain’t it, chief. Stiff movement and animations. No way to improve the aiming sensibility, which is terrible by default. The button placement is bizarre (wield gun with Triangle, shoot with R1, jack car with L1? Who the hell designed this?). It felt like playing Armored Core… but with a human… in Istambul… which is not Constantinople, mind you.

Controlling Tanner on foot is like playing Armored Core, but you die in two hits. And you only have a terrible pistol.

The one saving grace this game had way back then, aside from its graphics, was having a separate “do whatever the hell you want” mode outside of the main story, removing any risk of, you know, ruining a savefile because you decided to save after wreaking havoc. Then again, Driv3r just doesn’t have a lot of activities to be done outside of the critical path, which was an issue commonly shared by GTA clones of that era. To be fair, it’s something shared by many open world games to this day.

Was Driv3r one of the first truly overhyped games in history? One of the first games incessantly covered by press pre-launch, only to end up being the complete opposite of what it promised once it finally arrived onto store shelves? It’s worth discussing. Then again, hindsight is 20-20; it’s easy to laugh at the fact it was once touted to be a GTA killer, but there were just half a dozen GTA clones back then, and we didn’t have YouTube or other reliable video players to properly check how a game played before actually buying it. Maybe Driv3r was a victim of its own hype, a troubled project made by people who didn’t want it to be too similar to Grand Theft Auto itself. But it sucked then, and it still sucks now. Not even the rosiest of nostalgia goggles can save this one.