Driv3r

Drop a Dodge-shaped muscle car down a Miami side street and the thing feels alive: weight shifting onto the outside wheels, rear end breaking loose under throttle, panels crumpling into shapes you can read as a history of the chase. Reflections had been refining that model since the first Driver, and in 2004 it was still among the finest arcade-sim driving in any console game. Then the game opens a door and lets Tanner step outside, and everything that was precise becomes vague.

That split runs through the whole of Atari's 2004 release. The cities — Miami, Nice, Istanbul — are large, drivable and full of intersections designed to be taken at speed, and the missions that keep you behind the wheel hold up. Tailing a target through traffic without being spotted, outrunning police units that actually coordinate, surviving a pursuit with a bonnet flapping over the windscreen: these are the sequences the engine was built for. The on-foot sections are the opposite. Aiming is loose, cover barely exists, enemies soak up fire, and the checkpointing punishes you for the engine's shortcomings rather than your own.

The story leans hard on crime-cinema pastiche, with Michael Madsen and Ving Rhames among the voices and a plot about an undercover cop embedded with a car-theft ring. It is serviceable, and the cutscenes are stiff by the standards of what Rockstar was doing in the same window. Comparison with San Andreas was unavoidable then and is unavoidable now, which was always going to be unkind to a studio whose real talent was vehicle physics rather than world simulation.

What survives best is Film Director, a replay editor that lets you recut a chase with free cameras, lens settings and timing control. It is a strange, generous piece of software to attach to a troubled action game, and it suggests the team knew exactly where their strength lay. There is also Take a Ride, the free-roam mode, which is where most people ended up spending their hours: no mission timer, no gunfight waiting, just an empty city and a car that rewards knowing how to balance it.

The game is remembered for what went wrong, and some of that is fair. But put the controller in someone's hands, let them chain two corners together on a wet Nice promenade, and the complaint changes shape. The fault was never the driving.