Car-Jumping Shift Mechanic [Driver: San Francisco]
The Shift Mechanic in Driver: San Francisco turns a basic open-world racer into one of the craziest driving games ever made. Instead of physically hijacking cars, your “shift” into other vehicles from a bird’s eye view.
And the game uses this cool idea to its utmost — you don’t just drive races or chase people, you can hijack cars to knock out other racers and take the lead, or stop a convoy from reaching its destination by hopping into oncoming traffic. There are even multiplayer races where you can try to stop your friends from reaching a destination.
It’s an awesome mechanic, and I can only think of one other game that does something like it — ironically, an earlier game. Battlefield 2 let you leap into other soldiers from the map. It’s a great concept. Seriously, why isn’t this in more games?
WORLD (Ways of Reordering Life’s Destiny) System [Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together]
Only unlocked after completing the game, the WORLD System and an entirely new dynamic to your choices. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together is a Tactics RPG like Final Fantasy Tactics — except the story can branch out wildly depending on your decisions. With the WORLD System, you can finally see how your decisions branch, and easily jump around to experience everything the game has to offer from a simple chart-like menu.
It’s a great system, and one we’re seeing more of — just not where you’d expect. Adventure games like Detroit: Become Human start off with choice boards, showing everything you can accomplish (and miss) through your decisions. This simple gimmick takes away some of the mystery, but also reinforces just how much more you can see in a game. I think that trade-off is worth it. In my experience, games that try to obfuscate their content always have much less than they imply.
Check out more great gimmicks of gaming on the next page.
