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Prepare for a disappointment, this driver's just failed the test.

Stradivarius made violins of legendary artistry. Buy one. Sell your kidneys and both your lungs and buy one, then detune it and give it to a six-year-old to play the Cheeky Girls song over and over as you suffocate yourself in a tear-stained pillow. Or, right, dig up and reincarnate Picasso in the body of an eight-armed super-being, then get him to paint your hallway that lovely magnolia your mum likes. Or play Driv3r.

But seriously, as acts of foolishness go, we'd recommend the first two. Driv3r - pronounced 'driv-three-ar', tell all your friends - has finally rolled into town clutching a shiny Trident Of Wow, prodding furiously at onlookers' eyes with its three pointy points. Point one: a superb selection of effortlessly cool European cars that look just as good mashed up as sparkling. Point two: over 150 miles of roads in three cities, only one of which - yes Miami, don't look at Istanbul, we mean you - is boringly flat. Point three: it's got handling that means cars slither, squeal and smoke at least as hard as the leading actors in the classic Hollywood driving movies that inspired it.

Driv3r takes these things, inioned on its tri-pronged fork of gaming wow, and confidently lobs the lot into a gurgling river of filth. It then invites you to take a drink. As a place to spend time spinning, destroying and filming cars, Driv3r is triumphant, but as a game - can we've given the phrasing of this some considerable thought - it is shit.

We swore so much the television switched itself off. The game's main theme is punishing you for not knowing things you couldn't possibly know, causing levels of frustration so colossal they're visible from space. It's actually hard to believe anyone who didn't design the missions has tried to play this. Masochistic? Patience-stretching? If God ever takes a break from doing whatever it is that fills his days and plays this, within half an hour he'll impulsively squeeze the universe to a point of infinite mass and let it all explode again. Even Nelson Mandela would set fire to the pad and slap you. Repeating missions ad naus3um unearths, one by one, all the small things that cause failure. And it's not even consistent, so you never reach a 'Driv3r' state of mind where you understand where the developers are coming from; what they want you to do. We could fill this entire magazine with examples of crooked design, but writing it would set our therapy back several months. We shall not go there again. Oh, all right, you twisted our arm textures and our difficulty curve's gone wonky. Let's go...

We presume, as so many years and so many millions have been spent on this, there are good reasons for all of these. It's just we can't imagine them. The first time you shoot a gun you're told not to shoot paper civilian targets, just paper villains, but you're not told which is which. The second time you shoot a gun you'll find Tanner has some crab in his lineage - all the better for living in a river of filth - as he'll scuttle sideways quicker than he goes forward, meaning gun fights degenerate into a kind of fatal Riverdance. And the next five or ten times you fight, you're already growing angry - because, having lost the crim who escapes by using a disorientating cut-scene as cover, you're still fighting the same battle. Over and over. You fight, you watch the cut-scene, you drive off again and again until you get it exactly right. A one-off lapse? No. It's deliberate, and it gets worse. Much, much worse.

One later mission involves shooting eight goons to get to a truck. Reliably killing them all means approaching the building from two separate directions and carefully killing them round corners. And we mean carefully - we were regularly shot through walls, once through an *eight-foot-thick piece of castle*. At last you secure the truck, but it's got a crate of explosives in the back on a short timer. Roar off and within fifteen seconds an enemy Aston Martin shunts you into a bus and you erupt. Failed. Now you must play the whole thing again. It's actually possible to avoid the enemy cars - in fact, it's vital - but that's never mentioned. You're left to find out by accident, repeatedly wasting your time and dying. Assuming you can still be bothered.

Later still, we completed a chase in Istanbul (not the one features in 'Diary Of A Madman' - there wasn't room to print how many times we did this one!) and were greeted with a cut-scene where our quarry jumped a bridge as it raised and crashed her car, while we skidded to a halt. As the scene ends, we're instructed to find another way over. We check the map and head for the next bridge, only to be told she's got away. The mission's failed. And, unlike every mission so far, this time we don't restart from the new objective - we have to repeat the chase before as well. Well, Christ. What did we do to deserve this? Is this supposed to be 'more' fun, somehow not catastrophically annoying? Would you like to nibble on this?

Worse, we (finally) completed the chase again, found a boat, crossed the river, couldn't get on the dock because it was too high, swam miles to some steps, ran to the big red arrow and found it was behind a chainlink fence. And the mission failed. So we did it all again, and again, and again, failing at various stages, until we finally got to the other side of the building, found another chainlink fence, nearly died of horror and ran randomly to the front. That worked. Why's the big red arrow pointing to the area behind the building, then? We don't know. But it wasted at least half an hour of our lives. Amazingly, Driv3r manages to throw failure at you in a constant stream.

Add to all this the need to drive absolutely flat out through unpredictable traffic that's frequently timed to block junctions. Add hints that it's 'clever' to complete one objective before another without indicating which is which. Add extra objectives that are impossible with low health (we couldn't crash a roadblock in an artic because we'd fallen off a ladder in the previous mission). Add non-player characters that idiotically stand the wrong side of cover and happily let enemies unload clips into them from three feet away, consequently dying and failing the final mission for you - a mission that involves no driving. Add missions with two or three insanely difficult parts and no save points in-between, add miles of streets you never see in the main mode, add the fact that one male and one female pedestrian appear to follow you through the game shouting 'hey!'... it's hardly Grand Theft Auto. In any sense.

And how strongly do we have to put this: it doesn't need to be and it shouldn't even be trying. It's as if creating such huge cities, creating all the shonky shooting missions and extra non-driving detail has drawn vital attention away from what Driver does best - being Driver. Despite that, the core is here, the cartoonish driving, the brilliant crashes, the wild slides and sexy cars. It's just that this all-important core - the essence that made Driver so wonderful in the first place - is used incredibly, astonishingly, almost superbly badly. At times you see what they were going for, somehow get near a car you're chasing and see how joyous it looks in motion, but the other 49 times you play the same mission you never even see it. Hear that? It's surely the sounds of hearts breaking. But it may be an echo from another place, the shrieking sound of the Cheeky Girls being scratched out on a Stradivarius.

Even a game about swimming would have a story these days. Does Tanner really die at the start? Yes. A bit. On his arse, at least...

As Michael Madsen's strangely stilted 'making of' voiceover informs us, Driv3r... um, Hollywood production values... immersive gameplay... oh, something like that. It's quite dull. Driv3r certainly starts promisingly, with a properly directed opener complete with moody titles (and big Hollywood names) really creating an atmosphere. But the characters turn out to be the emotionless psychopaths of modern cliche, however, and lok to have been cloned from the same embryo - and the further you go the more confusing it becomes, which doesn't help in understanding the missions.

Occasional extra scenes use the game engine instead of this flashy FMV, further jumbling up your head until it simply melts like butter, catches fire and stinks the place up like old shoes. All of the above is based on a true story.

Want to see the best side of Driv3r 4orget the undercover missions, play the Film Director

Roll the streets in Take A Ride mode and make it dramatic - wheelspin, drifts, jumps and crashes. Or get a good chase going in the Driving Games. Keep it short and explosive, then hit Film Director. Spend time with the highly controllable cameras and effects, and the game's underlying excellence quickly starts to shine.

Close-ups reveal the beauty of the models, the complexity of the animation, the crispness of the shadows... and, of course, the superb nature of the bouncy, tyre-straining physics. Invisible boundary walls and limits on camera travel are a shame (preview versions were entirely free-roaming) as the cities stand up to even the longest views.

If you enjoy creating replays - the original had the same function - exploring and quick chases, you might add a point to the score. It's excellent. In fact, were itnot for Film Director, Driv3r might have scored lower.

Our time with an Istabul mission, in which we had to chase down the badman was so emotional, we decided to log the whole thing. Just for you. Starting on foot as the bagman drives out of shot, you run to a car and tear off after him. A lot. Here's how it went...

Attempt 1: Didn't see where bagman's car went. Target lost, mission failure. Attempt 2: Hit parked car, reverse. Bagman gone. Fail. Attempt 3: Drive the long way round parked car. Fail. Attempt 4: Run to different parked car, door won't open. Fail. Attempt 5: Slide wide exiting car park. Fail. Attempt 6: Flat out on straight. Too slow. Fail. Attempt 7: Collide with car while exiting car park. Fail. Attempt 8: Half-spin after brushing curb. Fail. Attempt 9: Hit immovable lamppost. Instantly stop. Fail. Attempt 10: Flat out on different straight. Fail. Attempt 11: Slide into a different immovable lamppost. Fail. Attempt 12: Slide into another different immovable lamppost. Fail. Attempt 12a: Tea and biscuits, polite low-level murmuring. Wash hands. Attempt 13: Barrel roll after hitting kerb. Fail. Attempt 14: Sideswipe yet another lamppost, half spin. Pull away. Fail. Attempt 15: Hit three avoiding traffic in corner. Fail. Attempt 16: Roll after shortcutting across grass. Fail. Attempt 17: Release throttle avoiding lamppost. Fail. Attempt 18: Brake hard for junction. Fail. Attempt 19: Overshoot junction. Fail. Attempt 20: Hit solid steps hidden by boxes in narrow lane. Fail. Attempt 21: Overshoot different junction. Fail. Attempt 22: Get in front! Shoved along sideways until destroyed. Fail. Attempt 23: Overshoot same hard-to-see junction as attempt 19. Fail. Attempt 24: Make hard-to-see junction. Turns out to be final one. Car destroyed by enemies. Enter building on foot to be shot dead through stone wall. Chase mission complete.

Graphics 80%
Gorgeous but sometimes scruffy and slow.

Sound 70%
Great voices, decent engines.

Gameplay 50%
Insanely annoying, unbalanced missions.

Lifespan 60%
Missions will put off many. Director helps.

Overall 60%
After all this waiting, Driv3r is a big disappointment. It's scrappy and feels half-finished - approach with extreme caution.