Driver: Renegade

Driver: Renegade is an action racing title that Ubisoft Reflections designed specifically for the Nintendo 3DS shortly after the console's launch, as one of the platform's first racing launch titles. The game returns to a rawer take on the series than the sprawling open-world San Francisco – it offers a series of shorter, intense missions set in the streets of an American metropolis, where the player combines fast driving with aggressive maneuvers: ramming opponents, pulling off flashy takedowns, evading the police, and smashing through the scenery around them. The emphasis is on immediate action and short play sessions lasting a few minutes, which suit a handheld audience and play-in-bursts style well. Individual missions offer several types of challenges – from classic pursuits through time-limited demolition duels to sections where the goal is instead to escape an armed convoy – and the player gradually unlocks new cars and upgrades between them for later, harder chapters.

The main reason the game came out specifically on the 3DS was the console's glasses-free stereoscopic 3D display – the chases, crashes, and slow-motion destruction shots were designed to make the sense of depth and separation between the scene's layers stand out on it. Renegade also uses the console's gyroscope for supplementary camera tilting and offers a control scheme adapted to the smaller screen, the touch display, and the more limited number of buttons compared to home consoles. Content-wise, it's a standalone title with its own cities, vehicle roster, and set of missions, not a scaled-down port of one of the console Driver games – which is why it never came out on any other platform and exists only in this single, purely handheld form.

Why play: Driver: Renegade will appeal to 3DS owners looking for brisk, aggressive driving with destruction and stereoscopic effects that make full use of the console's hardware, rather than a sprawling open world, and who will also appreciate being able to knock out a mission in a few minutes between other activities.