[This month is officially Driver Month here on Gamer Limit. Join us as we embark on an exhaustive road trip in a series of retrospectives for the Driver franchise in the run-up to Driver: San Francisco.]
It would take four long years before another Driver game would burst onto the scene in an intoxicating cloud of smoke, ready to serve its pining fans after Driver 2. To help quench this thirst, Reflections introduced Stuntman in 2002, a game that that played on Driver’s affinity with cinematic car chases by starring you as a charmless Hollywood stunt driver on fictional film sets. In Stuntman, you were required to perform death-defying car stunts in a series of stringently timed scenes for some upcoming action movies.
While the obvious film parodies were fun to watch, the game ultimately pushed the limits of trial and error by constantly demanding precision driving and was, above all else, infuriatingly difficult. As Reflections’ debut for the next generation of consoles however, it served as an effective appetiser that showed great promise for what was to come in the Wheelman’s next outing.
With the avalanche success of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, it’s fair to say that the next generation of Driver had an awful lot of catching up to do. Expectations were running high, especially with the impending release of San Andreas the same year just to add to the pressure. As a result, many were hoping that the third instalment would be everything that Driver 2 should have been, given the advantage of the extra graphical muscle thanks to next generation hardware. Instead, what we were given is widely regarded as one of the most disappointing game sequels in the whole of video game history.
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