When Ubisoft announced that it was buying the rights to the Driver series back in September, fans of the very first Driver title saw a brief glimmer of hope. Atari had pretty much been running the series into the ground since picking it up from the ashes of its original publisher, GT Interactive. Perhaps, in the hands of a new publisher keen to make its mark on the driving game genre, this could mark a fresh start for the series, maybe even some kind of miraculous rebirth.

It’s a shame then that Driver 76 picks up where Driver: Parallel Lines left off – bumper deep in a flood of mediocrity. To be fair, unlike Driv3r, it’s not a total mess and, unlike Parallel Lines, it’s not really, really annoying, but it’s not very interesting or exciting either. It’s just like, y’know, driving, like, around a city.

But hang on… didn’t the original Driver involve nothing more than driving around cities? And wasn’t that great? Yup, it did and it was. In fact, it was a 94% Play Classic, and playing Driver 76 has forced us to ponder why. We’ve raided our collective memory banks and concluded that Driver’s brilliance came pretty much down to just one thing – physics. Driver had superb physics; so good that they’d easily embarrass most of latest, and supposedly ‘high-tech’, generation of games. Not only did its cars, with their springy Seventies suspensions, feel as authentic as anyone could have hoped, Driver could also boast of debris physics that, at the time, were unprecedented. Thanks to these physics, simple (but tightly designed) point-to-point missions became riotous, high speed stunt courses. The car handling made the game fun and unpredictable, and the debris made it spectacular to look at. This game had a detailed replay editing with good reason.

Now, fast-forward to 2007 (or 1976 if you want to be funny) and compare with Driver 76. It just doesn’t compare. The vehicle handling isn’t bad as such, but it feels far too safe and forgiving to ever make you feel like you’re driving by the seat of your pants. Even when you’re driving a truck that’s driving a car and your character points out that it’s swinging all over the place, it feels slightly awkward to drive at speed, rather than wild and dangerous like it really ought to. Whenever you crash and/or fail any mission it’s because you lost concentration, or you simply got unlucky, and never because things got too crazy and you lost it. Some gamers might prefer the more forgiving, predictable feel, but we’d rather fail in style than succeed in tedium.

And debris in Driver 76 is usually little more than a fleeting visual effect. You don’t get nearly enough bits and pieces flying everywhere whenever there’s a collision, and what little you do get tends to be little more than a fleeting visual effect. Nothing seems to have a tangible physical presence and this leaves collisions feeling a little hollow; just plain frustrating, rather than frustrating but entertaining at the same time which, again, is the way it really should be. Here, there’s just far too much ‘oh’ and nowhere near enough ‘WOAH!’

Driver 76 thinks it can make things more exciting by mixing things up a bit. Yes, you can choose from a selection of missions, including non-compulsory side-missions; yes, you can get out of the car and steal other cars; yes, you can shoot a gun on foot or even at the wheel; yes, there’s stars scattered around the city for you to collect; but no, none of it really makes the game any more exciting. Without a decent game engine under the bonnet, every one of these different features just feels like a slightly different shade of beige. Of all of these, only the shooting at the wheel is actually bad, demanding that you use a finger-knotting, PSP-dropping number of buttons all at once, but frankly not being bad just isn’t good enough.

So yeah, despite its pedigree of producing decent driving games in the shape of the new OutRun titles, Sumo Digital has failed to kick-start Ubisoft’s driving career with the roar we all dared to hope for. Instead, it’s got off to an uninspiring sputter, accompanied by a rather worrying rattle. It could just be your exhaust’s coming loose, mate, but if you ask us there’s a dead horse being flogged in your fuel tank. It’s still ticking over mind, but only just. It’s frustrating to see the whole point of the Driver series missed yet again, with lazy bandwagons preferred over any real effort to produce actual fun and excitement. Perhaps we were naïve to expect anything else, but the fact is that Driver was a great game and there’s still not been anything quite like it since. Like an old banger that belches black fumes, breaks down on a monthly basis, and can’t get up a hill without a push, the Driver series is really starting to piss us off. But we’re too attached to want to see it slung on the scrap heap just yet.

Gavin Mackenzie