Our story begins in 1978. You are an eighteen year old who goes by the name of TK and you have moved to New York City in search of a more exciting life from the boring west. You're pretty good behind the wheel of a car, and you build up a reputation and eventually get introduced to a man called Ray, the best driver and mechanic of his time. However Ray introduces him to Slink who is a criminal looking for fame and fortune. After doing a couple of jobs for him Slink introduces him to The Mexican and the story goes on from here.

As these things normally go, stuff doesn't pan out quite so well for TK, and the gang of criminals he worked for at this point (you will meet these people later in the game) set him up and he gets locked up for twenty-eight years. This takes us up to 2006 with TK being much older and out for revenge. This turns your perspective of the game right around with you suddenly having to get to grips with much faster cars, better weapons and a big change to New York City. This story however is quite boring and isn't good enough to keep you hooked all the way through.

The area you play in Driver 4 puts you in New York City which is divided up by three large bridges. There are many different types of side missions to be tackled such as helping robbers escape from the police, checkpoint races and so on. The money can be spent on things like bullets for guns and car upgrades. Upgrading a car regularly is very important because some of the harder races will need upgraded and faster cars than normal. A useful feature that all the garages have is a ‘Store Vehicle’ option where you can keep all the cars you find for free in the garage so if you left you car out in the middle of nowhere and you select the vehicle in the garage you get it back instantly. Also New York is a very large city so the garages can be moved to four different places one of which is your safe house.

As you can expect from the title the majority of the game is in a car but there are foot sections and guns will be used too. Missions are all GTA basic rip-offs like a mission where you steal a special police motor to use later in a jail break or driving at intense speeds to spook the guard in your car to give you info. The targeting system is absolutely terrible. You have to press L1 to target someone and more often than you would like it doesn’t target the right person. Which is frustrating, and it takes a long time to change targets.

Weapons can also be used in cars but with such an awful targeting system you will rarely use it unless you are chasing a target. The police are very advanced. There are two different types of cop alerts you will receive, with one being the police chasing you for shooting or killing people and the other with them chasing your car because you are causing mayhem or killing bystanders. It is a very advanced system to use and it often works well. Police also start to chase you for doing other things like ramming them, running away from them when you slightly touch their cars and the most interesting one is whenever they chase you for speeding or going through a red light.

When driving the cars feel like they are gliding rather than driving on the road, and because of this makes it difficult to drive. Also the crashes bring the car to a full stop almost every time. It brings a lump to your throat when you’re in a high speed chase with your car going at 130 MPH thinking you have escaped laughing and BAM you crash right into a post and its game over.

Graphically Driver: Parallel Lines surpasses its rival GTA in all ways. Cars look sweet with excellently rendered designs from real cars and awesome interior detail. The surroundings actually do resemble NYC and the time period you are playing in. For example in the early section of the game NYC is run down, darker and for some strange reason a lot of the buildings are brown in the poor part and silver in the middle part of the city. However whenever the game goes to the future the city is much, much brighter, a lot less dark and less run down and actually looks like a city from the future.

For a game of this size and magnitude there is surprisingly little reason to replay the game over again. Other than doing the side missions, getting all the tokens and unlocking all the cheats there is no real incentive to re-play the game other than completing it on a harder difficulty. Very bad targeting system and pathetic car handling brings the game’s enjoy ability down severely. Also with the annoyance of the story not being interesting amongst other things this lowers the games score badly.

Even though I have given the game a bad review it is good in parts and it is certainly better than its little brother Driv3r. This game's graphics for example are top notch with few games matching its excellence. With that said, and all the bad points I made, I would recommend you rent before you buy.