The premise behind Driver is so simple and obvious that it borders on genius: you take the wheel of a getaway car and do everything in your power to shake the cops. But while that alone sounds like a load of fun, developer Reflections didn't stop there. Driver is an homage to the myriad 1970s car-chase flicks that had American males lining up to see fast cars engaged in wanton acts of injury-free carnage, and from its "wakka-wakka" funk soundtrack and B-movie plot to its mind-blowing urban chases, it makes you the star of a fuel-injected tour de force.

You play as former stock-car driver Tanner, who left the racing circuit for "police work". Your assignment is to infiltrate a big-time criminal organization, but to do that you've got to make a name for yourself. So your first couple of jobs will be simple affairs: a bank heist and transporting a stolen car. Succeed at those, though, and you'll find yourself in the middle of some pretty heavy action - and because you're so deep undercover, the cops want you just as much as the guys you're trying to bring down.

The game opens on the broad boulevards and scenic causeways of Miami, but as your star rises in the underworld, you'll be sent to San Francisco and Los Angeles, before finally winding up in New York City. Each move brings a new set of challenges and cops that are a little bit better than the ones you just bested. Just because you were able to blast your way through traffic in Miami doesn't mean you'll be able to burn rubber up and down the narrow streets and steep hills of San Francisco.

Reflections has done a nice job of spreading the missions out among the four locales: just as you're growing tired of cruising the same old streets, it's time to move on to a new spot. The scenery for each city is highly convincing, with recognizable landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and the TransAmerica building in San Francisco, and the Empire State Building in New York. And each metropolis is alive with plenty of cars and pedestrians (who always manage to jump to safety when a car bears down on them), working traffic lights, and police cruisers on the prowl.

But what really matters is how intense the gameplay is - and it only takes one mission to find that Driver rates near the top on the adrenaline-rush scale. You simply can't get any closer to being in a car chase movie than this: high- powered muscle cars, multi-car pile-ups, airborne pursuit, and smoldering wrecks are standard fare on just about every job you take, and the Tarantino-style presentation gives everything an even more cinematic feel (though I was irritated that one mission is a direct lift from Pulp Fiction). When a driving game makes you squeeze your controller so hard you get wrist cramps, it's pretty obvious it's dishing up some high-octane action.

Yep, Driver comes on like gangbusters from the get-go, but its console-system heritage and some dubious design decisions keep it from making a clean getaway with an Editors' Choice Award. The first videogame annoyance you'll find is that selecting a pad, stick, or wheel as your controller invalidates all keyboard input except for the ESC and Return keys; I pounded the "1" key for five minutes before a long- distance call to GT Tech Support revealed the flaw. Is there any conceivable reason for this design hitch? Nope.

Then there's the issue of saved games. There's no need to save during a job because they're so short, but not being able to save after each mission is, to me, the hallmark of a lazy port job. There are save points throughout the game, but they usually come after you play two, three, or four missions in a row: if for some reason you must give up before completing the last in the series, you can look forward to the thrill of repeating missions you've successfully completed to get to the one you didn't! (On the other hand, there's no way to access a mission you do want to replay except by loading a saved game - and there are only eight save-game slots.) The worst-case scenario is if the last mission is divided into sections that allow you to continue after failing without returning to the very start. You'll finish two of three sections with so much damage you know you'll never complete the third part, and the only way to start the whole mission over again is to replay the two or three that came before it.

You can use the Director feature to edit replays of your most spectacular chases and create your own mini-movies, and while it can be a bit tedious (thanks to the lack of a mouse support or even a standard Rewind button), the results are usually jaw-dropping. So why, pray tell, did Reflections decide to limit the number of slots for replays to that magical number of eight? Of course, you can access a Quick Replay after every mission, but during long chunks of it you'll see drama unfold from underneath the street.

There are a couple of other areas where Driver disappoints; namely, the police AI and the replay-value department. I don't expect heavy-duty realism in a pedal-to-the-metal arcade game, so I don't mind that the cops smash up about five or six times as many civilian cars as I do - it's the most common way you lose a tail, in fact. But it does bug me that their favorite tactic is head-on collisions at 70 miles per hour, and that changing the cop AI from Easy to Medium simply gives the police faster cars and the ability to set up better roadblocks almost instantaneously.

And as far as replay value goes, there just isn't much here. There's no multiplayer mode, and the standalone driving games are either training in disguise, exercises in futility, or downright boring (dirt track racing? Give me a break!). About the only decent diversion is Carnage, where you try to do as much damage as possible in 60 seconds, but even this gets stale after a few times out.

But while Driver could definitely have been better, it's still pretty damn good as it is. This might not be the first arcade racer where you run from the cops, but right now it's most certainly the best.

-Stephen Poole