Driver: San Francisco

Driv3r was not the most well received game of the series. Seen by many as a too-little-too-late response to Grand Theft Auto 3, the game was mostly met with lukewarm reviews and featured lackluster action and atmosphere. So it was quite a surprise for gamers when Driver: San Francisco turned out to be one of the greatest sleeper hits of the year.

To talk about the plot too much would be to give away some amazing twists, but let's leave it at this: you play as a character who winds up in a coma with sequences taking place both in modern day and years ago before he was put into the coma.

The game innovates on previous installations in the series, offering greater freedom of movement and some exciting action possibilities along the hilly streets of the City of Brotherly Love. As of the release of GTA3, Driver because sort of a second-tier crime-sim series, always playing catch up to the industry-shattering revelations of Rockstar's signature series. Driver: San Francisco is no longer playing catch up. Driver: San Francisco has been widely accepted by gamers as a great game in its own right rather than a runner-up to Grand Theft Auto.

Driver: San Francisco has made a number of pushes forward in the area of storytelling in an open-world game. The simplistic, relatively linear stories of the GTA series contrast with the open-world setting while Driver: San Francisco goes back and forth in time and plays a number of tricks on the player, throwing unpredictable twists and turns from every direction.

While the game is superficially similar to the GTA series, there is a lot of depth here that sets it apart and makes it a great game in its own right, even if comparisons seem impossible to avoid. Tightly scripted with beautifully realized environments, Driver: San Francisco is not one to miss.