Price: £39.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes 60Hz: No Dolby Digital 5.1 sound: Yes Xbox Live-enabled: No Driver: Parallel Lines is the long-awaited sequel to 2004's engaging, although somewhat problematic at times, Driv3r. Will it give you plenty of mpg? Will it stall at the starting line? Will I come out with any more lazy cliché? The subtitle to this sequel stems from the fact that you, as TK, start off in 1978 as a young driver-for-hire who gets in with the wrong crowd as he's helping to take down some of the big boys from the underground crime scene but is framed and ends up in the slammer for 28 years. When he goes in he's just 18, but when he emerges, it's 2006, a whacking 28 years later and he's seeking revenge.

So then, it's a question of driving from A to B in order to complete the numerous missions, both before and after the time change... and what a lot of driving there is to do. Missions are too far apart to get to, which is a main bugbear because after you've travelled a massive distance to get somewhere, then get a bit cocky and go off on one of the many side-missions that present themselves along the way and end up getting capped by the cops, there's no nearby hospital at which to drop you off so it's back aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the way to your garage bloody miles away. Thus, this kills the just-one-more-go factor that a game like this should have because you soon get fed up and put a different game on instead. You can 'relocate' to the other garages which cuts down sometime but it's still not perfect. What also annoys is how strict the cops are. They'll chase after you if you're driving fast or acting suspiciously, or even just running a 'stop' sign. You really have to watch yourself when playing this game, checking the map to see if they're nearby... which doesn't lead for exciting driving. One plus, at least, is that when the cops spot you, both you and the car get a 'wanted' rating. If you can get out of sight and change cars then you can get away undetected, but if they see you get out then you're stuffed and it won't matter what car you drive. This sounds interesting in principle, but you won't stick to it, you'll just drive like you do in GTA because driving normally is for real life.

As for the cars themselves, this time round they do give better handling, and you notice as you career around the good draw distance of the graphics with few pop-ups - not that there's much to look at since Driver: Parallel Lines features very bland cities that just don't seem to have the life or atmosphere in them like the GTA games it's trying to emulate. You also don't get stopped by running into lamp posts anymore as long as you're travelling at speed, you can just knock 'em over a la GTA which saves for embarrassing moments when you're raging down the road in a lorry miss a turn and twat a lamppost, which made the rear-end jump up in the air in an unnatural fashion given that you'd just cut through lanes of cars like a knife through butter(!) You can also customise your cars as you go, but if you're like me then you'll be driving like a demon and bashing them up at most opportunities so you'll be acting conservatively if you go more than a few streets without thinking about changing it, so why bother spending money on it? Also, while driving, there's a "Thrill-cam" button, which isn't particularly thrilling and is something you'll use for a while early on and then not bother. All it does is take a 'live' close-up view of your car in slow motion as you drive past the virtual camera, but doesn't allow you to save this footage, not that you'd really want to.

Talking of saving footage, where did the movie director mode go? That was one of the most fun parts of Driv3r and which really set it apart, as well as other aspects, from the most famous drive-and-be-violent game I referred to earlier. However, it's good that this time they've taken some time to redevelop your character when walking such that you can turn him 360o rather than see him always facing forward and looking like he had piles when moving about. This, again follows a lot in the footsteps of GTA. Alas, you can't jump but at least you can crouch while walking which was something you couldn't do last time. When it comes to the aural interludes you can use more than just the default game playlist by selecting those tracks which you've already ripped to your Xbox hard drive, although those do start by including cool '70s tunes such as David Bowie (Suffragette City), Blondie (One Way Or Another) and The Stranglers (Peaches), so not to worry too much although the in-game tracks do seem to repeat with alarming regularity; there's certainly not as big a variety as in... yes, you guessed it. Overall, Driver: Parallel Lines is a disappointment. We've been to the 1970s before in Grand Theft Auto III and whereas Driv3r had its problems it did have a style to it that kept it well enough apart from the competition and kept me coming back until I completed it but it just needed to fix the walking and driving problems it had back then, which has been mostly achieved (c'mon, really, why can't he jump?) Sadly, Reflections have failed to put 2 and 2 together to make '4' being the number in the series where everything fits together perfectly. Instead, they've thrown that chance away and made an end result that's too much of a GTA clone and, let's face it, nobody does it better than Rockstar for design, implementation and just goddamn coolness!

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2006.