The tutorial level of Driver is infamous for being an overly restrictive gateway, preventing many people from ever accessing the main game. I learnt about this many years after the game was released, and indeed many years after I’d played it. I can’t recall if I found the tutorial difficult; I just recall that I never managed to complete the final level, which I believe was about escorting the president somewhere.
Anyway. I discovered that I have Driver installed on my Playstation 3, yet I hadn’t played it. It seemed an ideal thing to try. I loaded the game up, somewhat trepidatiously, and started driving around the car park.
It took me four attempts. The first failure was on the slalom, which I quickly realised was because you have to come back on yourself and get around to your starting point. The second and third failures were on the brake check, which I think wasn’t marked off because I wasn’t going fast enough. Other than that, it was pretty simple.
Moving onto the game, and things became even easier on the first mission, with a single police car giving me chase towards the end of my journey. The second mission, delivering a tainted car for dismantling, was more difficult, with the police setting up a roadblock on one of the major roads. Luckily I skipped straight through that, and it caught the police cars which were chasing me instead.
It looks pretty basic nowadays, and the comparisons to GTA3 don’t do it any favours. At its heart, though, this is a fun game which I’ll probably play more of, given its convenience.