Driver: San Francisco Preview – trafficking with a teleporter

One casualty of the new Star Trek approach is the need to walk, which is just as well as walking has never stood Driver in good stead. Gunplay doesn’t appear to have escaped the cutting room shears either, thankfully – though speaking of cutting rooms, the movie-maker that was among the original’s pioneering features is present and correct.

A round of Trailblazer in process. Stay inside the streaks from the AI's brakelights to score points.

Ah, nothing like a good segue is there? It’s the prose equivalent of a shot of vodka. Mind you, such argumentative flourishes must be kept in check lest they overwhelm the reader with sheer lateral thought, in much the same way (snip!) that San Francisco’s bouts of psycho-physical leapfrog need to be kept in check lest they make a mockery of the idea of racing at all. Reflections has opted for a straightforward solution here. Shifting drains a resource bar, and players must pull off more traditional feats of auto-artistry like powerslides and jumps to rejuice it.

The driving model itself is also a familiar one, pitched at roughly the same level of skiddy, backend-throwing ‘soft realism’ as Midnight Club: Los Angeles. It feels a bit under-muscled right now, with fewer of the inertial camera tricks you find in Rockstar’s game and the curious absence of nitro. Still, pursuing the tail-lights of an AI car through oncoming traffic in ‘Trailblazer’, one of nine multiplayer modes, is an undeniable knuckle-whitener, prompting me to brace my feet against the chair legs and adopt an expression (I’m told) normally seen on the faces of incontinent elephants.

Shifting enables some crudely effective competitive tactics, like leaping to a better-aligned car as you plough into the outside of a curve. A favourite but riskier strategy when ahead is to shift behind the wheel of a motor in the other lane – preferably a bruising specimen, like the Dykemann Titan lorry – and sledgehammer back through pursuers (any of whom might shift out of harm’s way and take the lead).

In some situations (e.g. while participating in a police chase) you can hot-swap cars by hitting a face button.

All this needs to be accounted for in the balancing, again, if the fifth Driver is not to crumple beneath the weight of its own gimmicks. Ubisoft’s task here is hardly an easy one, and with release day not long off the fact that single player is not, apparently, ready to demo is a little worrying. But San Francisco has the makings of a game-changer. Some developers try to get round their rivals through canny wheelmanship alone; Reflections has chosen instead to teleport straight to new territory, and while the landing may yet prove rough you have to applaud them for making the effort.

Driver: San Francisco is slated for PC, Mac, Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It leaves the garage on 23rd November in North America and 26th November in Europe.