Driver: San Francisco is a thrilling mobile version of Ubisoft's big budget PC racing game of the same name.
What's it about?
Just as in the full game, Driver: San Francisco for mobile sees you play the role of Detective John Tanner. Your mission is to track down a gang of criminals led by the notorious Charles Jerico.
Driver: San Francisco for Java phones replicates the great gameplay elements of the original. This means you get missions, challenges, races, and a free ride mode where you can explore the city. Along the way you can pick up items such as nitros and cash. You can use this money to buy new cars or upgrade your current one.
Just as in the main game, the mobile version of Driver: San Francisco contains varied missions. You'll need to chase down bad guys, escape the cops, perform stunts and more in order to unlock new items and progress through the story. You can choose to play the story mode in Driver: San Francisco in a linear fashion (i.e. one mission after another), or stumble across missions in your own time in the free ride mode.
Look and feel
The story mode in Driver: San Francisco isn't as lavishly presented as we'd hoped, and is disappointing in comparison to the main version of the game. Cut scenes and dialog between the various characters aren't very dynamic, making the story feel a bit drab.
The in-game graphics in Driver: San Francisco are very good. Considering it's a Java-based game we were impressed with the level of detail in the San Francisco backdrop. Better still, we experienced very little lag even at high speeds, testing on a Nokia N85.
Just like Gameloft's other excellent mobile driving game, Asphalt 6, the controls in Driver: San Francisco are very straightforward. The game features auto-accelerate and the controls for turning, boosting, braking and switching cars are all well placed.
If you're a mobile racing game enthusiast then Driver: San Francisco should definitely be part of your collection.
