Everyone’s favorite driver, Tanner, returns in this third installment as the undercover cop, voiced by Michael Madsen of Reservoir Dogs fame, on the trail of a car theft ring that plans on shipping 40 stolen cars to Istanbul. You infiltrate the car theft ring that is lead by Calita, the saucy Latina voiced by Michelle Rodriguez, and find that you have gotten yourself in a little too deep. Through the 25 missions in the game, you’ll find yourself on both sides of the law and neither side on yours. The driver series of games have always been pretty good compared to many of the other car series of games out there.

Like any car game, the detail and graphics of the cars should be spectacular and Driv3r is no exception. All the cars ranging from classic convertibles of Istanbul to the fast and sleek sports cars of Paris look fantastic and all drive as well as they look. Reflections on the rooftops of the cars and the blurring of the taillights as you swing around a corner in the dark are all as good as it gets in any game. When you smash up your car, which you will be doing a lot in this game, the damage looks great and realistic with tires that can go flat, hoods that fly off and bumpers that drag along the ground. The major graphic achievement in Driver isn’t during the game play however, but rather the cut scenes in between missions. The animations and visuals along with the voice over work is drop dead gorgeous and near movie like. Unfortunately all that high praise doesn’t go to far.

For a game called Driv3r, you actually do a fair amount walking and running. When you are driving it is usually to chase after an objective that is fleeing the scene or to get to a destination in an allotted amount of time. But too often when you get to a certain destination you have to get out and walk to complete the next part of it. It’s not as if you just run into a building either, you need to fight your way through crowds of enemies and go up and down stairs and through hallways and buildings. The action when you are walking is sub par at best in the best of scenarios and even with the heavy firepower you can acquire such as, m16’s, Uzi’s and even grenade launchers, it doesn’t make it all that much better.

Of course the foot missions were about a quarter of the game and the rest of the time you were driving, but even then it sometimes was frustratingly annoying. There are things in the real world that will happen no matter what, such as a car being able to drive through, or at least over, a 4 foot tree. But that just doesn’t happen in this game. Take said tree for example, if you were to run your car into it, you would flip over or stop dead in your tracks in the most cases. No matter what car or truck you are driving, be it a motorcycle or an 18 wheeler, it goes for almost every object in the game, light posts, curbs, benches, you name it. As if not being able to drive through things wasn’t frustrating enough, there are some missions that are just down right maddening to say the least. There are quite a few of the missions where you need to chase after someone and stay on their tail until they reach their destination or they crash. These missions are great fun except if the car you are following gets about 100 feet in front you. When that happens, you get a big failed mission screen as the other car is too far away, even though you can still see it down the road.

This happens way too often and there are missions like that where if you make one little mistake such as running into one of the invincible super stick trees, you blow the whole thing and need to restart. Of course that’s not to say that every mission will have you cursing and swearing like a sailor, but those are the ones that will have you turning the game off. There are other missions such as the one where you need to steal three cars and drive them into a moving trailer before the trailer reaches its destination, or the mission where you stand in the back of a truck and toss grenades at cop cars. These are extremely enjoyable missions for the sheer challenge and unfortunately there just aren’t enough of them throughout the game.

Even with the very cool film director abilities to replay your missions or upload them to Xbox Live and watch other submissions, chances are by the time you pass the levels that took you 100 tries to beat because a car decided to turn into you or other any other random hindrance, watching it again is the last thing you’ll want to do. With the additions of the Take a Ride mode where you can peruse the city at your leisure or others such as Survival and Quick Chase, there isn’t a whole lot of extra features to enjoy. Especially when the basic flaws of the game are embedded in those modes as well. Driv3r is such a great game on paper and it really could have been an awesome experience if they had just taken some extra time to fix those few little glitches. They weren’t all that major, but instead they allowed them to remain and turned a great game to a mediocre one at best.