YMMV / Driver

• Awesome Music: New York at Night.
  • That and San Francisco Night from the first game, especially since Allister Brimble made a remix for the expansion packs of the first RollerCoaster Tycoon.
  • New York Escape at Day is also a very epic song.
  • "Conditions" by Kenny Rogers as it plays over the ending of Driver 2 is very satisfying.
• Cliché Storm: The biggest criticism of Driver Renegade is how shamelessly it indulges in cliches from police and crime films.
• Common Knowledge: Jones dies near the end of Driver 2, but is alive unexplained in 3, right? Not quite. Jones is wounded in "Chase the Gun Man", but gets up and tells Tanner to go after the assassin, and is seen in the final cutscene bringing Pink Lenny into custody.
• Critical Dissonance: Most critics disliked Driver 2 and preferred the original, chiefly for the inclusion of what was seen as clunky on-foot controls, while the majority of the Driver fandom considers it an Even Better Sequel.
• Difficulty Spike: The final level of the first game. Even using an invincibility cheat, it's easy to lose the level by having your car flipped over.
  • And, oddly enough, the very first level is easily one of the hardest; and unlike the last level, no cheats will help you here. And if you happened to not know what certain car tricks were such as slaloms or burnouts, it could potentially be unwinnable; especially if you didn't happen to have internet access at the time, and failed to find the training menu with the demonstration.
  • It didn't help that the detection for some of the tricks was a bit unreliable and the harsh time-limit meant there was possibly not enough time to try the trick again if it didn't register the first time.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Tobias Jones, to the point that he was brought back in DRIV3R after he apparently died in Driver 2.
• Good Bad Bugs: DRIV3R is pretty buggy in general, but in the PS2 version, there's a huge glitch you can do in Nice. Go down to the airport, and slowly drive over to the bush you see on your left. Doing so will cause you to fall through the ground onto a piece of land below. If you go in with a truck, and drive off said piece of land, you can launch yourself out of the glitched area and into the sky. This is sadly fixed in the Xbox version.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One of the three cities in DRIV3R is Nice, where the player can of course run down pedestrians. Then in July 2016 a terrorist attack like that really did happen in Nice.
• Most Wonderful Sound: "We've lost him!" in the original game when you finally shake the police.
  • "Goddamn... You're the man! We're gonna need you!" for beating the near impossible tutorial.
  • "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" by Kenny Rogers, which plays at the end of 2 over the credits after you beat the game.
• Nightmare Fuel: When you die from an explosion, it makes an overly loud explosion that can easily scare you similar to many screamers you find in internet.
• Obvious Beta: Looking at all the glitches, bugs, and sometimes poor physics in DRIV3R, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the game just wasn't finished. And as several articles and research concluded; it wasn't and was rushed out the door to compete with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
• Obvious Judas: The reveal in Renegade that Senator Ballard is the Big Bad really isn't that shocking for two good reasons.
  • He's a senator, and senators are almost always portrayed as evil or amoral.
  • His chief of security, Warren Nolan, is practically the poster child◊ for Obviously Evil.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: DRIV3R suffers from an especially unfortunate case of this due to its Obvious Beta status and the aforementioned rating scandal that had many hopeful fans deeming it an unworthy sequel of the first two games.
• Porting Disaster: DRIV3R is generally an unpleasant experience no matter what system its played on, but the Game Boy Advance version deserves special mention due to having texture warping issues so bad that they create Alien Geometries. The entire world seems to distort based on the player's position, and simply driving in a straight line causes the road lines to fluctuate to the point that they resemble an EKG monitor. Walking isn't any better, as buildings and walls will collapse inward if the player is close to them. These are only a couple of examples, and the end result is a surreal, nauseating mess.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: DRIV3R and Parallel Lines are this, While DRIV3R only really removes most of the luck elements from missions, Parallel Lines generally reduces it further with more generous time limits, health kits restoring full health and generally more powerful weapons.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: While the original could be quite difficult at times, some of Driver 2's missions are ridiculously hard, even when compared to the original's most difficult missions.
• Sequelitis: DRIV3R is the most straightforward example of this, having been plagued by gameplay bugs, extreme difficulty, lack of factors that makes the competition good (Worldbuilding and Song Association, as the game doesn't even have radio stations and the free roam and story mode were still separated like the previous two DRIVER games) poorly executed on-foot segments, and the aforementioned controversy surrounding the game's ratings with critics. The only redeeming factors were the slightly better graphics at the time and pretty good city design (plus, there are not many Wide-Open Sandbox games set in Nice and Istanbul). While it did not kill the franchise, it was some time before the series was finally able to leave this one in the dust.
• So Okay, It's Average: Parallel Lines got this reception from critics and fans. While it's not nearly as broken as DRIV3R and does a better job of integrating on-foot combat, it's still regarded as a rather unremarkable GTA clone with a boring story and forgettable characters.
• Special Effect Failure: While decent for their time, the graphics of the first two games have aged especially poorly due to the grainy textures, limited draw distance, and the degrading frame rate whenever the gameplay becomes intense. Notably from Driver 2, the water textures are virtually nonexistent, with any area that should have water instead just being a mirror of the skylines and landscapes lining the horizon.
• That One Level:
  • Arguably, the very first mission in the series, where you have to do a list of stunts to prove yourself worthy of continuing. Said level takes place in a tiny underground garage, you have a minute in which to do the stunts, and you can only hit any obstacle four times (though much of its difficulty comes from younger players not knowing what a slalom is). Another major problem with the driver's test is that it's effectively a tutorial level in which you have to perform all these basic skills, but the game doesn't tell you how to do them. Not to mention how finicky it can be in certain segments, like what exact route you have to take to pass the slalom part. And the worst part of it all? There is absolutely no way of skipping the level, short of editing your save file. This level is remade in an unlockable challenge in Driver: San Francisco as a Nostalgia Level. Thankfully, not mandatory.
  • "Rite of Passage", which involves driving from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side of Manhattan under a strict time limit in the rain. You need to be absolutely perfect, and the invincibility cheat doesn't help because you're more likely to fail due to skidding in the rain or just running out of time trying to make it. Luckily, if you take the second choice for the first New York mission, you skip "Rite of Passage" in exchange for a much easier level.
  • The fourth mission of Driver 2 has you tailing a car without getting seen or too far. While such mission has been seen in many Wide-Open Sandbox game after Driver 2, the proximity error margin was minimal.
  • "Chase the Gun Man" from Driver 2 is known as one of the most difficult missions in the series by many, if not the most difficult. In it you have to chase and destroy a car on a narrow mountain-side road with lots of traffic and obstacles. If you crash into anything at all, you might as well restart the mission as you have very little chance of catching up.
  • The motorcycle chase in DRIV3R is infamous for being insanely difficult and unforgiving; in order to keep up with Calita, you can't screw up even once or you're pretty much guaranteed to fail. There's a chance you can crash into her at a certain point and end the mission early, but you have to be quick about it. Thankfully the final mission after this is straightforward.
• Vindicated by History: DRIV3R has earned a bit of appreciation and a cult fanbase in the years since its release. Divorced from its hype cycle and backlash, it has won praise for its strong graphics and environmental design, detailed driving physics and surprisingly varied and involved missions. The common stance towards it today is that, yes, it is an Obvious Beta trainwreck, but one where a lot of its ambition still shines through.

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