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Have You Heard the Good News?

With Driver 2 being out for awhile on console now, it's only a matter of time before it becomes available on the PC, so is it worth hanging around for? That's a question that's open to interpretation really. I should point out that there is very little difference between Driver 1 and 2. The game engine is basically the exact same, the layout of the game is also very similar and the way missions work. Perhaps the only straight forward differences between the two are slightly revamped graphics, the ability to get out of your car and usurp other people's cars, and better cutscenes over missions in new cities. Really it's a game where if you've played one, you've played the other. The best way to describe Driver 2 is to say it's like a full-scale mission pack to the original with a major patch included.

Smooth Moves

There's a nice feature in the game called the Film Director. The way it works is that you save the replay of a mission when you do it, then you can go into the Film Director and have it do a variety of things. One is to let it randomly place cameras and replay the action of your mission back to you. Another feature, which is the main one, is that you can set up the camera placements and types yourself, for example you might want it showing a high view while you're going over the bridge, just for two seconds, then have three and a half seconds at ground level with the camera chasing the car, etc. It's a nice feature, and if you have twenty minutes to burn you can come up with a nice little film to show your obviously captivated audience who will no doubt cheer and applaud your talents.

Performance

So how does this puppy run? Very well, to put it bluntly. The game offers resolutions up to 1,600 x 1,200 though that's out of the league of my meagre monitor. Still, if you're running on a 133 Mhz processor with a Video Card you rigged up from your old Sega Master System, the game offers a resolution of 320 x 240, though I think most people would agree that a resolution that low would be a disgrace even to a text-based adventure game on someone's pride retro computer. Anyway, let's look at the test systems:

Computer 1

Computer 2

With the game running at 1280 x 1024 resolution, I didn't notice any major performance differences between the two computers, though Computer 2's GeForce 2 card did make the textures look a little smarter. At the beginning of Survival mode though, I did notice a concerning slowdown for a few seconds, but it quickly settled back into a nice framerate.

While playing the normal mission-based game at 1280 x 1024 res with all graphical options ramped up to maximum, Computer 2 refused to falter, maintaining a continually good frame rate. Computer 1 was almost exactly the same, which is quite a feat considering how dated the Voodoo 3 PCI card now is. Sometimes I think it would have been nice if they'd allowed you to set a further viewing distance, as a mid-range computer could quite easily handle the extra graphics being loaded in. Still, the only gripes with the game are minor issues, and few changes were needed since the Playstation version, which had to release without glitches, because patching a console game is currently out of the question. So let's end with the system requirements, which certainly seem reasonable for the minimum.

Minimum System Requirements