Driver 2: Back on the Streets, released in North America as Driver 2: The Wheelman Is Back, is a 2000 action driving game developed by Reflections Interactive and published by Infogrames for PlayStation. As the second installment in the Driver series, it expanded dramatically on its predecessor’s groundbreaking open-world structure, introducing the ability for players to step out of their vehicle and explore on foot for the first time. In this article, we’ll explore its story, gameplay innovations, soundtrack, and how it was received by critics and players alike.
A Cinematic Crime Story Across Four Cities
Driver 2 follows undercover police officer Tanner and his partner Tobias Jones as they track down a small-time crook named Pink Lenny. The story kicks off in dramatic fashion at the Red River Bar in Chicago, where Lenny is bragging to a Brazilian associate about a recent scare tactic, only for armed gunmen to storm in moments later. Lenny barely escapes the resulting shootout, while the Brazilian man he was talking to ends up dead, his body marked with a tattoo linking him to a criminal organization led by a gangster named Alvaro Vasquez.
From there, Tanner and Jones discover that Lenny, formerly a money man for gang lord Solomon Caine, has since switched allegiances to Caine’s rival Vasquez, setting off a wave of gang conflict across the city. As the investigation unfolds, the story eventually takes players from Chicago to Havana, Las Vegas, and ultimately Rio de Janeiro, where Caine and Vasquez’s complicated history comes full circle in a dramatic reconciliation near the base of the Christ the Redeemer statue.
Because the game relied so heavily on full-motion video cutscenes to tell this story, and those cutscenes were fairly advanced for PlayStation-era hardware, Driver 2 had to be split across two discs, with the first covering the Chicago and Havana missions and the second covering Las Vegas and Rio.
Getting Out of the Car for the First Time
The single biggest gameplay addition in Driver 2 was the ability for Tanner to exit his vehicle and explore environments on foot, something the original Driver never allowed. This single change opened up an entirely new layer of interactivity, letting players walk around, interact with select environmental elements, and most importantly, commandeer any other vehicle they came across in the city.
Missions remained heavily vehicle-focused, typically involving trailing witnesses, ramming pursuing cars, or making daring escapes from gangsters and police. A cutscene played before nearly every mission to push the story forward, giving the overall experience the feel of a Hollywood-style car chase film rather than a traditional racing game. Despite the new on-foot mechanics, all violent confrontations in the game were handled exclusively through these pre-rendered cinematic sequences rather than in actual gameplay.
Four Sprawling Cities, Each With Its Own Identity
Driver 2 expanded its world considerably compared to the original game, featuring four cities that were each notably larger in scale: Chicago, Havana, Las Vegas, and Rio de Janeiro. Chicago and Havana were immediately accessible through the game’s free-roaming Take-a-Ride mode, while Las Vegas only opened up after completing the first two cities’ missions, with Rio serving as the final, story-capping location unlocked after Las Vegas.
Each city incorporated real-world landmarks to help sell its identity, including Chicago’s Navy Pier and Wrigley Field, Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución and El Capitolio, recreations of the hotels lining the Las Vegas Strip, and Rio’s iconic Corcovado mountain and Christ the Redeemer statue. Every city also hid secret unlockable vehicles tucked away in specific locations, rewarding players willing to fully explore beyond the main mission path.
A Soundtrack Built Around Cinematic Atmosphere
Much like its predecessor, Driver 2 leaned heavily into a soundtrack reminiscent of classic 1970s car chase films, blending instrumental funk and boogie tracks with licensed songs that matched the tone of key story moments. Tracks like “Help Me” by Sonny Boy Williamson and “Just Dropped In” by Kenny Rogers & The First Edition appeared at pivotal points in the story, while Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” underscored the game’s climactic confrontation in Rio.
Background music also shifted to reflect each city’s cultural identity, drawing on Son Cubano influences in Havana, Western-style instrumentation in Las Vegas, and samba and bossa nova rhythms in Rio. Interestingly, one of the background themes used during Chicago missions bears a striking resemblance to Paul Phoenix’s theme from Tekken 3, largely because both tracks happened to sample from the same underlying guitar source material.
Bringing the Experience to Game Boy Advance
In 2002, a portable adaptation titled Driver 2 Advance brought the game to Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, developed by Sennari Interactive. Due to significant memory limitations on the handheld, this version had to be condensed considerably, retaining only the Chicago and Rio storylines while either omitting the Havana and Las Vegas content entirely or folding relevant elements into the two remaining cities. On the upside, the Game Boy Advance version introduced a four-player link cable multiplayer option, expanding beyond the two-player split-screen mode available on the original PlayStation release.
A Mixed Critical Reception Despite Strong Sales
Driver 2 received what Metacritic classifies as mixed to average reviews across both platforms, with critics noticeably divided on how well the sequel improved upon its predecessor. GameSpot’s Ryan MacDonald was firmly positive, calling the PlayStation version an extraordinary game. IGN’s Douglass C. Perry took the opposite stance, describing it as one of the most disappointing games of the entire year 2000. Other outlets landed somewhere in between; NextGen felt the game would satisfy both newcomers and fans of the original, while stopping short of calling it revolutionary.
A recurring technical criticism centered on the game’s performance, with frame rate issues and slowdown becoming noticeably worse than the already imperfect original Driver, particularly during busier on-screen moments with multiple vehicles and pedestrians active at once.
Strong Commercial Performance Despite the Criticism
Whatever critics thought, players turned out in force. Driver 2 sold roughly 2 million units worldwide by February 2001, a result Infogrames counted as a genuine success at the time. The PlayStation version earned a “Platinum” sales award from the UK’s Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association, reflecting at least 300,000 units sold domestically, and ranked as the 12th best-selling game in the UK for 2001.
In the United States, the game performed similarly well, landing as the 10th best-selling title of 2001 with total sales of 865,709 units. Its closest competitor that year, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto III, ultimately outsold it by roughly 1.1 million units, but Driver 2 nonetheless held its own in an increasingly crowded open-world gaming landscape that it had helped pioneer.
Final Thoughts
Driver 2: Back on the Streets pushed its series in a genuinely ambitious direction, expanding its world, adding the ability to leave the car entirely, and wrapping everything in a cinematic, crime-thriller presentation few driving games attempted at the time. While critics remained split on how successfully it built on the original, strong sales and a lasting cultural footprint cemented its place as an important stepping stone in the early evolution of open-world game design.