Please can you help me? Does any game tick all these boxes:
car driving/racing game
can play on PC
has a self-contained ‘Pursuit’ or ‘Survival’ game as well as the ‘main’ game
I can drive my car around a detailed city landscape (not a racing track)
while pursued by cops/chasers of some kind
enjoying stunts, jumps and other evasive manoeuvres
can make a short movie of the chase afterwards, editing camera angles and so on
can stand a realistic chance of surviving/winning if I’m good enough
The ‘Survival’ game within Driv3r comes close, but is sadly unwinnable. Even if you evade all the cops you will fail because of cops shooting from the sidewalks and rather random tyre blowouts. I don’t want to play endless hours of driving ‘missions’ or plough through a long story. I just want the thrill of a good chase.
Burnout: Paradise seems to fit these criteria as well. My stepson likes it and the Need For Speed series equally well. He hasn’t played it on PC (sigh…he’s a console-gamer only) but it sounds like the mods and patches for it are pretty good. First thing you may want to do is download the “shut the annoying songs up” mods that might exist, as they’re designed for the shouty demographic.
Don’t bother with the earlier games in the Burnout series, which mostly consisted of “crash into other cars in the most interesting way.”
The first one in particular (aka Need for Speed III); it allows the player to perform stunts like driving onto a ledge to avoid cops. Or maybe that’s Need for Speed: High Stakes (Need for Speed 4)? I forget which.
Thanks for your suggestions. I don’t know much about these games, so I appreciate your advice.
There are several Need For Speed titles, so it’s hard to choose the right one. Some reviews such as this one suggest that in ‘Hot Pursuit’ all the drives/races follow pre-determined paths. There is a ‘drive where you want’ mode, but without any chasers (a little like ‘Take A Ride’ mode in Driv3r, which is largely un-chased unless you provoke the cops a lot, and even then the chase is mostly dull and ineffective).
Burnout seems to have some ‘SecuROM’ issues on the PC and there’s a lot of bad reviews for the game quality (such as this Amazon UK page). (I live in the UK.)
I’ve heard good things about the GTA series, and Vice City may be worth checking out. However, from what I’ve read I would have to play through the whole game and complete the ‘missions’ in the plot, which doesn’t really interest me. There isn’t a stand-alone ‘drive around and evade the cops’ game. (I’m open to correction on that.)
In an ideal world, there would be something like the ‘Survival’ game in Driv3r but without random gunfire and random tyre blowouts that render it pointless and make it impossible to survive beyond about 2 minutes, no matter how good you are.
Typically in GTA titles you need to complete the story missions to open up new areas on your map; in Vice City and GTAIII, the game world consists of three large islands with bridges between them. Once you hit enough of the game missions, some of the bridges will be opened and you can go explore new areas and get new missions. The missions can range from quite stupid, to really freaking hard, but it’s strangely addicting. If you don’t want to do the missions, you only get to see 1/3 or so of the whole map. That 1/3 may be fine for you, who knows?
As far as having a “drive around and evade cops” mode in GTA games, that’s available any time you want it. Commit a crime (from theft up to murder) and you’ll get a wanted level. On the first wanted level, any cop who sees you might try to arrest you, but you can otherwise drive around fairly freely. At level two Wanted and above, cops actively seek to kill you, with increasingly more effective means as you get more wanted levels. Eventually dozens or (seemingly) hundreds of cops, FBI in black SUVs, and military troops come a-runnin, and it can get quite crazy. In all the GTA games there are also insane epic jumps that you need to drive around to discover, and you get achievements for running them successfully.
I don’t know that GTA-whatever is going to be your cup of tea – it’s not really a racing game and doesn’t follow conventions of those games. But GTA-VC and others are quite old and probably quite cheap and may be worth picking up if you see a marked-down copy somewhere. I’d recommend GTA San Andreas if only because the game world is huge and the camera behaves sooo much better than the awful camera VC and GTAIII. But you still have to do a bunch of story missions to open up the whole map, so I don’t know if that’s going to work for you.
Loved survival mode in Driver 2… Played Driver 3 way more than I played GTA 4…
I’m very surprised your yet to play the GTA series though, you have so much catching up to do. GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, & GTA 4, plus by then GTA 5 will be out.
I haven’t played Driver Parallel Lines yet but it may be similar to the other Driver games. Also, Driver 4 San Francisco is either out or will be out this month and the game play looks awesome, plus licensed cars.
Mafia 2 (haven’t played 1) is similar to those games but with a 1930’s atmosphere and old cars.
And if you like those games, watch some videos of Just Cause 2…
Again, thank you all for your help and advice. Most of the older games are available at very low cost, so it’s easy to check them out.
Squeegee - thanks for the extra clarification regarding the GTA series! That was very helpful.
Hennesy - I bought Driver: Parallel Lines hoping it might have an improved version of the ‘Survival’ game, but it doesn’t have it at all. There are no separate games, just the main game with a gazillion missions. I don’t know about the very newest release in the Driver series, but none of the ads or specs I’ve seen for it suggest ‘Survival’ is included.
I’d pay a chunk of money to have someone tweak Driv3r ‘Survival’ and take away the cops shooting from the sidewalks and the random tire blowouts. Then it would be a truly awesome game.
How about the original Driver? Yes, it is now very old (maybe so old it wouldn’t run on a modern PC) but still a lot of fun. The survival mode is pretty tough though, I don’t think I’ve ever lasted more than a minute. On the other hand, the “normal” free play mode allows you to get the cops on your tail as well, in more manageable quantities than the survival mode.
Well they say the Driver series is trying to return to its roots and Driver: San Francisco just came out and it is awesome.
The Collectors edition has a “Mass Chase – a wrongfully accused driver attempts to escape the whole police force of San Francisco and prove his innocence”
No guns in game so no need to worry about tires popping.
The Directors Cam allows for your short clips, I saw 4 min 30 secs.
And the standard game has an ordinary “getaway” mode. Shift into a vehicle (sort of like Sam in “Quantum Leap”), bump a cop, and the chase is on until you keep them out of your red zone long enough. You’re toast if your ride dies.
Conversely, you can shift into a Charger or Escalade cruiser and bump a criminal then stay in their red zone and damage their ride until it dies. Forcing a criminal into a head-on with a big rig is fun! If you find you can’t keep up, you can always shift into a cop who is closer to the action. Or someone else entirely if you see an opportunity; I’ve taken out criminals while driving an armored car right at 'em! Careful you don’t accidentally hit a cop afterwards and initiate a getaway, like I did first time I tried this.
Only problem is that you’re apparently stuck using the keyboard/mouse unless your PC is equipped with a Xbox 360 controller. There is no way to remap steering. Good thing I have lots of practive with keyboard steering from playing the orignal Test Drive in DOS.