Driver: Vegas

Driver: Vegas is a mobile spin-off of the well-known Driver series, famous especially for its car chases through open cities and missions built around driving without ever stepping out of the vehicle. Gameloft transplanted this concept into the setting of Las Vegas, offering the player a series of missions in which the goal was to escape the police, reach a designated location within a time limit, or escort an ally through a city full of traffic. Controls used the numeric keypad for steering, gas, and brake, and the game tried to preserve the sense of speed and risk typical of the series' console installments, though it necessarily had to sacrifice some of the complexity of the original's open world.

Instead of classic circuit racing, the game was built around freer movement through the city's streets, which was fairly ambitious for mobile at the time - simulating a more open environment with traffic and police chases required the developers to make clever simplifications so the game would even run smoothly on weaker phones. Visually, the game came across as surprisingly atmospheric thanks to the night lighting of the streets and neon signs evoking the gambling atmosphere of Las Vegas, and individual missions were interspersed with short breaks showing an overview of progress. Between missions, the player could also freely drive around the city looking for shortcuts, which lent the game a touch of the freedom characteristic of the whole series.

For fans of the Driver series, it was an interesting way to carry a favorite brand around in their pocket, in an era before smartphones. Critically, the game wasn't seen as a perfectly faithful conversion of the console original, but it was praised for its effort to preserve the atmosphere and pace of the action-packed chases on a small display. The very idea of driving without ever being able to step out of the car and shoot, typical of the series' first installments, was preserved even in this lighter mobile form. Today it stands as a period record of how big action brands adapted to the limitations of phones of the time and sought a compromise between fidelity to the original and playability on limited hardware.

Why play it: For fans of the Driver series who will appreciate the effort to preserve the atmosphere and pace of action-packed chases even on a small display, including the ability to drive without ever stepping out of the car.