Driver: Renegade

Genre: Driving Action

Players: 1, StreetPass Supported

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Review:

Driver: Renegade, released on the Nintendo 3DS in 2011, is a Driving Action game that puts players in the role of a vigilante driving the city streets in various missions to hunt down the city’s crime lords.

When it comes to the presentation, Driver: Renegade has its ups and downs. The 3D visuals look decent enough, if slightly low-poly. That said, there is a lot of pop-in here, which can at times make this look like a PlayStation One game, and darker levels where it’s overcast can make the entire screen look muddy and hard to see. On the bright side the framerates seem to be pretty steady.

However, whatever good qualities are in the presentation are hard to appreciate when the game’s story is so absurdly juvenile and its characters are so ridiculously dumb, with series protagonist Tanner cracking childish and repetitive one-liners as he collides with criminals’ cars causing them to explode in a highly-unimpressive manner. The voice acting in this game is extremely cheesy and poorly-written, and I got sick of Tanner calling every enemy a “shithead” very quickly.

While I wasn’t overly impressed with the presentation, the core gameplay is at least pretty fun, though it’s extremely arcadey and unrealistic. However, that’s not the real issue here. Firstly, the game’s use of a big red arrow to point in the direction of your destination, but not always clearly highlighting it on your screen or showing the best route to get there on your map. It can be particularly confusing when you’re chasing down a car and it’s close to you but not in front of you, making it hard to gauge where they are in relation to you.

However, the other issue here is that this game’s story mode is surprisingly short, and doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen in countless other driving action games. It’s not bad, but there’s not much here worth talking about. What’s more, the absurdly cartoony physics here take a fair amount of getting used to. And while the game pads out the length with a “campaign” mode consisting of various challenges, this still feels like a much smaller game than a game with a faux open world should be.

As a result, Driver: Renegade is quite fun… but that fun won’t last long. It’s a decent distraction, but not the sort of game you’d want to pay full price for.

tl;dr – Driver: Renegade is a Driving Action game where players take on the role of a vigilante taking on various missions to hunt down the city’s crime lords. The core action here is fun, but the game is too short and too unoriginal, with embarrassingly bad characters and story. If you can get this game highly discounted, it still might make for a decent distraction, but it’s far too lacking in meaty content to pay full price for.

Grade: C

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