Format: Advance
Genre: Racing
Developer: Sennari Interactive
Publisher: Infogrames

Avoid this game. Driver 2 Advance is the first "driver" game I'm playing, but I'm aware of the series. Ideally, this game should be able to compete with other racer games or GTA-esc games, but this one is clearly a spit in the face of every car game in existence. Pedantic is a word not often used these days. Pedantic is how I would describe many of my attempts at beating some of the missions in this game solely due to RNG. Yes, that's right, you heard me, RNG. Imagine if you will a game of GTA and the cops instantly appearing on your ass as you start the mission and being fully aggro'd... not scripted, but just RNG'd. That can happen in driver 2 advance. I've had it happen several times, both stalking the start of missions and the end of missions. There are 30 missions in this car driving simulator, but the worst by far is one called "Damage Control". In it, you have to ram 3 cars in succession in under 10 minutes. That doesn't sound all that bad, in fact you can get the first car in under a minute. Of course, the second car can be kind of hard to take down when it literally suicides into the ocean causing you to fail the mission... again... and again... and again. Most of the missions in this game revolve around a plot of an undercover cop driving for a drug dealer or weapons dealer or something to hunt down some guy named "Lenny". The music is semi decent, the cutscenes serve to progress the plot. The gameplay is absolutely horrid. It somehow manages to control better than Need for Speed Carbon, yet at the same time, manages to mess up literally everything else. For one, the hitboxes are bad. You can be halfway into another car and not hitting them at all, but if something even sneezes at you funny, you fishtail like crazy, and always in the opposite direction you want to be facing. The movement itself is clunky and slow to speed up/slow down. Having a slow startup means you're going to be grinding face first into the wall until you can clear it... which naturally damages your car. You are able to jack other people's rides on some missions, but you don't have time in a lot of situations so you have to get creative. Each car has it's own health bar to take advantage of. The worst part however is the "Felony" system which is akin to GTA's stars system. If you are seen by the cops, for whatever reason, they will try to kill you. If they touch you, your "FELONY" meter goes up, and they get more aggressive.

The good(?) thing is that if you get away from them and switch cars, your felony meter goes back to 0, which doesn't mean shit considering that the cops will try to kill you if they see you regardless. This game takes a lot of patience and some good luck to beat. It has some extra modes for challenges and stuff but the story of this mode is in it's "undercover" mode.

All in All, This game deserves to be put in a dumpster and set on fire for it's score. The gameplay was awful, the RNG was atrocious, the plot wanted to be edgy but the gameplay held the entire game back. The ONLY saving grace this game had was that it's soundtrack was pretty decent. That's it. It wasn't even a good soundtrack, just a decent one. I imagine that between this game, harlem globetrotters, and daredevil, I could construct some type of GBAShitTaco. It'd probably be rated higher than this pile too!

A special shoutout to the mission "Damage Control" for absolutely pissing me off for an hour straight by enemies that would suicide into the ocean to cause me to game over.