Driver - Game Boy Color - Review

I recently stumbled upon a port of a game I had no idea even existed – Driver for the Game Boy Color. 

 The original Driver was released for the Sony Playstation in the summer of 1999 to both critical and commercial success. Reviewers of the time praised the game’s blend of arcade action and realistic car physics. I personally remember spending hours upon hours hooning through the streets of San Francisco screeching round corners and launching my car comically high into the air. It was a great game that went on to become a decent franchise albeit one that always lived in the shadow of another, namely Rockstar’s smash hit – Grand Theft Auto.

It’s from this rival series that the Game Boy Color port of Driver gets its inspiration. Sporting a top down view, the look and feel of the game is very reminiscent of the original GTA. It’s a smart move from developer Crawfish Interactive as it suits the limitations of the Game Boy Color’s hardware and works on a tried and tested gameplay style.

The game takes place over 15 missions where you, as an undercover cop work as a driver for some unsavoury mafia types. The jobs you undertake include driving the getaway car for a bank heist, racing to catch a speedboat, tracking down and ramming a target car off of the road and carrying out a revenge attack by smashing through the front of a chain of restaurants.

There are three impressively sized cities to carry out your supposed police work, each with a distinct visual style and map layout to distinguish them. Miami is a bright location full of highways and suburbs, LA is shrouded in a dim blue light and New York is instantly recognisable from its tall thin grid-like map.

The controls are as simple as they come with A being used as the go button and the left and right directional buttons being used to steer.  Strangely the brakes and reverse gear are assigned to down on the d-pad leaving the B button completely unused. It’s not a big deal or anything but just struck me as a bit odd. Pressing start pauses the game and brings up the invaluable city map showing you your location and the location of your current objective. There is handy red arrow that points you in the right direction but it can be misleading at times sending you into dead ends. Not ideal when you’ve got the fuzz up your tail pipe.

Although the specific car stunts learnt in the tutorial mission from the Playstation game are absent, the games physics allow you to satisfyingly slide your car around corners, deftly avoid collisions and out manoeuvre the ever ruthless local squad cars. Sadly the big jumps haven’t made the transition to the handheld and your car will remain firmly grounded at all times.

The graphics are simple but appealing, forgoing fussy details for clarity. The Game Boy Color’s palette is put to good use giving the game a nice bright look that for the most part makes it easy to see where you can and can’t go. Occasionally the top down perspective will show its limitations as you collide head on into ambiguous street lamps and whatnot but more often than not if you crash into something it’s your own fault.

                                      

The sound in the game is surprisingly decent with some nice 8-bit renditions of your typical 70’s car chase soundtracks. Your engine hums nicely, and your tires screech satisfyingly, and in a particularly nice touch other cars will honk their horns at you if you cut them up.

Aside from the main game, which is sadly over all too quickly, the game has a few generic missions such as ‘lose the tail’ or ‘survival’  to keep you occupied with the emphasis being on beating your best times. You can also just go for a drive although you’ll have to enter a password for one of the later missions to be able to access all three cities which feels like a bit of a pain. Thankfully one of the last missions has the easiest password to remember – red siren, blue siren, red siren, blue siren. The whole game would have benefitted from an internal battery save feature though as it can make replaying levels a chore.

I bought the game from a car boot sale for a few pounds and for that price I feel it was well worth picking up. It’s a short lived but addictive 70’s crime romp, with traffic filled cities as your playground. It’s a different beast entirely from the Playstation original but it has its own retro charm and retains the spirit of the series and should be considered a worthy game in the Driver franchise.

Keep an eye out for a cheap copy of Driver in future and tear up the city streets on your Game Boy Color.