Driver: San Francisco opens with a prison truck, a vial of acid, and a man who should be dead. Charles Jericho, having survived the shootout in Istanbul that closed out Driver 3, escapes a Turkish hospital and flees to the United States. Tanner, a police detective, pursues him to San Francisco. Jericho stages a breakout from his prison convoy, hijacks the van, and runs Tanner into a tractor trailer. Tanner lands in a coma.
That is the setup. What follows is the best thing Ubisoft Reflections ever built.
Trailer, via moviemaniacsDE.
A Coma Is the Best Thing That Happened to This Series
The pitch sounds like a concession. A coma dream is the kind of device a studio reaches for when it cannot figure out how to keep its own continuity straight. Reflections had spent four games dragging Tanner through car chases, on-foot sections, and Driver 3 (2004), which was poorly received. Driver: Parallel Lines ditched Tanner entirely. The series had no center.
So the fifth main installment puts its hero in a hospital bed and lets him drive anyway. Tanner wakes up in his car next to his partner Tobias Jones, and everything seems normal until he hears voices about an accident and then blinks out of his own body and into the driver’s seat of an ambulance. He is inhabiting the driver. He keeps his own memories and skills. He can do it again.
That is Shift, and it is the whole game.
Shift Is Not a Gimmick, It Is the Design
One of the inspirations for Shift came from Google Earth, which is a strange thing to admit and a very good thing to have done. The mechanic lets Tanner teleport from one car to another without breaking off whatever mission he is running. He can start missions this way. He can continue them this way.
Reflections described the move as a return to the roots of the series. The ability to get out of the car, introduced in Driver 2, is gone. The studio’s reasoning, as stated, is that too many games already had that feature and “it wasn’t desirable [for us] to just copy that exact mechanic.” So they replaced walking with possession. You do not leave the car. You become a different car.
It is a clean solution to an old problem. Older driving games stalled the moment you stopped moving. San Francisco never stops moving, because there is always another vehicle to be. A mission goes wrong, you Shift into a taxi, you keep going. The fiction justifies the mechanic and the mechanic fixes the pacing. That does not happen often.
140 Cars and a 1970 Dodge Challenger
The game runs at 60 frames per second and puts 140 fully damageable vehicles on the road, all based on real-life models. This was a first for the series, which had spent years using cars that looked like cars without being any car in particular.
The marques are the real thing: Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Audi, Bentley, Cadillac, Chevrolet, DeLorean, Dodge, Ford, GMC, Hummer, Lamborghini, Lincoln, McLaren, Pagani, Ruf, Shelby, and Volkswagen. The range runs from buggies and compact cars up to muscle cars and sport cars. Tanner’s personal ride is a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T.
Every car gets a boost, triggered by pushing up on the left thumbstick. Players on PlayStation 3 can push L1, and players on Xbox 360 can hit the left shoulder button, to fire off a special ram attack. The film director mode, absent from Parallel Lines, comes back, and clips can be shared on the Driver Club website.
San Francisco Is 208 Miles of Road
The setting is a fictionalized San Francisco, plus Marin County and Oakland. Reflections recreated the geography, the generalized layout of the city, and the landmarks that matter, including the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge.
The road count comes to around 208 miles, or 335 kilometers. The Wii edition cuts that down. Its bridges are blocked, and its territory is smaller. It also runs a separate storyline, serving as a prequel to the original Driver rather than a sequel to Driver 3. A separate version for mobile phones and Android devices was handled by Gameloft. The mini-comic series fills in the six months between Driver 3 and this game, and a collector’s edition adds multiplayer vehicles and single-player events.
The main story sends Tanner after Jericho, who intends to build a chemical bomb and hold the city ransom. Tanner inhabits the body of a small-time crook to infiltrate the organization. Jericho spots him immediately, because Jericho can Shift too.
The Cast Sells the Dream
Demetri Goritsas voices Tanner. Michael Dobson voices Jericho. Peter Benson voices Tobias Jones.
None of these are household names, and that is fine. The performances carry the premise, which is harder than it sounds. Tanner spends the game talking to a partner who does not know they are inside a coma. Goritsas has to play a man who is confused, then delighted, then increasingly certain that something is wrong with the world he is driving through. Dobson has to play a villain who is having a better time than anyone else on screen. Both land it.
The bomb plot is the weakest thread. It is a countdown clock dressed up as a story. The coma is the actual subject. Tanner is piecing together a plan in a dream world while it happens in real life, and the game knows that is the interesting part.
The Wii Version Runs a Different Story
The Wii edition is a different game with a different plot, a smaller map, and blocked bridges. It received mixed reviews while every other version received favorable ones. That split is not mysterious. The whole appeal of San Francisco is the size of the place and the freedom to Shift into any car in it.
The mobile and Android version from Gameloft is a separate product again, with its own release. Treat it as its own thing.
What Driver: San Francisco Gets Right
The Shift mechanic is the rare feature that makes a series older instead of younger. Removing the ability to exit the car sounds like a subtraction. It is not. Reflections looked at what every open-world game was doing and chose the one thing that fit a driving game specifically: you are never not driving.
The licensed cars matter more than they should. A 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T means something to a player in a way a generic muscle car does not. The DeLorean means something else entirely. When a game hands you a real car and then lets you abandon it mid-chase for a better one, the fantasy gets sharper, not looser.
The coma frame is doing real work too. It explains why Tanner can occupy strangers. It explains why the city feels slightly off. It gives the story a reason to exist after a previous installment that left the series with nowhere to go.
Where the Score Lands
Driver: San Francisco scored 8.2 out of 10 across six outlets in the IGDB critic aggregate, and that number holds up. The game has a weak spine in its bomb plot and a mixed-received version on Wii. It also has a driving mechanic built around possession, a real car list, a 208-mile playground, and a story device that turns a narrative dead end into an asset.
This is the last main installment in the Driver series to date. The franchise finally figured out what it was, shipped it, and stopped. If you missed it in 2011, the case for going back is not nostalgia. It is that the Shift mechanic still has no real equivalent, and the studio that built it has not been asked to build it again.
Hard Numbers
- Title: Driver: San Francisco
- Developer: Ubisoft Reflections
- Publisher: Ubisoft Entertainment
- Release year: 2011
- Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Wii
- Genre: Racing / action-adventure, open world
- Modes: Single player, multiplayer
- Critic aggregate: 8.2/10 (IGDB, 6 outlets)
- Vehicles: 140 fully damageable, licensed real-world models
- Roads: Around 208 miles (335 km)
- Frame rate: 60 fps
- Protagonist’s car: 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T
- Voice cast: Demetri Goritsas (Tanner), Michael Dobson (Jericho), Peter Benson (Jones)
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
