Hands-On: Shifting to Victory in Driver: San Francisco

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I played a lot of games during E3 preview week last month, but none had me so entertained as Driver: San Francisco.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Ubisoft’s multi-platform driving game, which it will release Aug. 30, is the best game of the show. It just means that Driver: San Francisco demos well. The action game lends itself to a 10-minute playtest. Although it will have both single- and multiplayer modes, I was glued to the multiplayer game that Ubisoft showed off at its E3 Expo booth last week in Los Angeles, a game of car tag that lets you shift between different cars on the fly.

The Shift mechanic will be used throughout Driver. It’s a thoroughly unrealistic but quite fun bit of business: At any time, you can project your astral spirit high up into the heavens, looking down upon the streets of San Francisco, and choose any car to warp yourself immediately into. It’s like changing cars inGrand Theft Auto except without all the boring work of actually having to get in and out of them.

In the multiplayer game I tried, you and three other cars start out somewhere in the Embarcadero Center, chasing a slow-moving colored car. The first person to bump into the car is “it,” and you earn points for each second you retain the tag. If one of the opposing players smashes into you, they get the tag and start earning points. First player to 100 wins.

Properly executed, this could be a fun multiplayer game even without the Shift mechanic. But that’s what makes Driver: San Francisco such a fresh, unique experience. Once you realize that you’re never stuck in your car and can jump to any other one instantly, the strategies begin to unfold. If you’re looking to get the tag, you start out by choosing cars that are near your target and trying to catch up to them. But this doesn’t work nearly as well as, say, looking for cars that are driving toward your mark, or waiting until the guy is just about to collide with a parked car, or something like that.

The risk factor is that you don’t want to be too choosy, because every second you spend looking for the perfect interception adds a point to your opponent’s total.

Once you get the tag, it’s clear you want to get out onto open road. Because you’re not simply trying to avoid the cars around you, you’re trying to find a place where there aren’t any cars at all. In the area of San Francisco we could play in the demo, this turned out to be highway onramps — there were cars on the highway and cars on the road, but not a lot of them getting on or off. Getting on or off the highway a lot turned out to be a good strategy for keeping the tag.

What left me feeling good about Driver after my demo was that in this age of bloated, overly complex console games, it embraced pick-up-and-play instant fun. I was already interested in this game for the promise of driving illegally around the city I live in, but the multiplayer demo has me looking forward to it even more.