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Shortly before the event, we'll work out which of these 60 special E3 game previews have enjoyed the most page views, Facebook 'Likes', ReTweets and poll votes (see below) and crown our first victor at the Los Angeles event. Show your favourites the love!

Game: Driver: San Francisco
Likelihood of E3 2011 showing: Certain

The offer to sit down with the first full chapter of Driver: San Francisco's single-player (and sneak in a quick hands-on with near-complete multiplayer code) at Reflections' Newcastle HQ was one we couldn't refuse. It's been a long time since we last checked in with John Tanner's return to the hustle and bustle of San Fran's sun-drenched streets, and we were keen to find out the real story behind the undercover wheelman's comatose, body-hopping adventure.

After a slick, cinematic opener that sees criminal meathead-cum- mastermind Jericho rescued from his police convoy by a helicopter, a femme fatale and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, we're slap-bang in the thick of the action without realising it. The transition from cut scene to in-game driving is seamless and demonstrates the power and potential of Reflections' built-from-scratch engine.

As Tanner and returning partner Tobias Jones pursue the fleeing Jericho in their '70s muscle car, we're thrust into short chunks of gameplay teaching us the hand-braking, rubber-burning tricks of the Driver trade.

The handling feels like a glorious throwback to the classic PlayStation original - the bouncy suspension sends you sailing over bumps and crashing into trash cans. Collisions with other vehicles have a wonderfully metallic crunch, spraying debris and shards of glass all-over the place.

When Jericho gets the upper-hand on Tanner and Jones, resulting in a heart-stopping crash, our hero is plunged into a coma and Reflections' game-changing mechanic rears its head. Tanner, unaware that he's out cold, discovers he can 'Shift' into, or possess, any other driver on the road in his subconscious gameworld. It's a silly situation and one that Tanner himself is quick to play for laughs.

CAR WARS
A tap of X or A pulls you from your vehicle and gives you a bird's-eye view of the city which is now, conveniently, in slow-motion. From here, just drag your cross-hair over any car you fancy, tap X/A again and bingo: you've got yourself a new set of wheels. There are different levels of Shift - from standard low-level to a long-range view of the city unlocked later on - and the speed and ease at which you use it is startling.

As Reflections' studio manager Gareth Edmondson explains, delivering on the team's original concept was a big demand: "Driver: San Francisco is something that has never been done before, and that takes a huge amount of time invested in research, experimentation, and optimisation to claw every fraction of a millisecond. In 30 frames per second (fps) it would have been quite a task, but 60fps is another story altogether. To achieve this we needed to develop our own rendering and physics engine from scratch."

It's not hard to see where all the development time (around four years' worth) has gone. The City by the Bay is a bustling metropolis, packed with traffic, pedestrians and all sorts of distractions. It's also an atmospheric old town which feels timeless - irrespective of the many cutting-edge vehicles cruising around. Gareth's brother, and Reflections' creative director, Martin, explains the old and new influences on the series: "The inspiration for the first Driver was actually many films, all of them '70s car chase movies: Walter Hill's The Driver, obviously, but also The French Connection, Bullitt, the original Gone in 60 Seconds," he reflects.

"The crazy cops jumping over the hills were inspired by The Blues Brothers. Later iterations took the same core inspiration for the car action but added additional ideas from the films of Michael Mann - like The Insider and Collateral - for the way we use music in the games, and particularly editing cutscenes to music.

"Driver: San Francisco is interesting as it retains all of the same inspiration, but I would add one or two more contemporary movies with quality car chases like those in Ronin and the Bourne films."

The Shifting tutorial is one such movie-style street chase. It has you hopping between Tanner's car and that of some fleeing felons, scaring their pants off by forcing them over some steep ramps and even making them go bumper-to-bumper with other police cars to put them in a real fix.

With the Shifting tutorial over, and the crooks in custody, the city's your playground. Tanner's missions and other activities are marked on a map at the top of the screen - an absolutely indispensable tool for getting to know your way around. The missions we choose are a mixture of the hilarious and high-risk.

From ruining a driving lesson to sending traffic into chaos for a nearby news crew, there's as much variety in the tasks as the wheels on offer. Though it might sound like frivolous fun, beating missions feeds into Tanner's tale. Each completed task builds our hero's Will-Power points, leading (presumably) to his eventual recovery in the real-world. And, we're guessing, some Shift-less driving.

SHIFTY BUSINESS
A few more Shifts into the main game and several surprises are revealed. By building up Will-Power, new abilities to help Tanner get by and cause mayhem are unlocked. The Ram ability comes first, allowing us to charge up our vehicle and send it lunging forward, becomes nail-biting and terrifying.

Picking out the right engine for the job is crucial and brings a new level of strategy to the game of cat-and-mouse. In this case, the bigger the better, and we manage to Shift into a truck a few streets ahead of the action which we then use to lie in wait for the target.

Once drafting behind it, we're home free, blocking out the competition and sealing a victory by racking up the slip-streaming points. It's much more polished and robust than our last encounter with it and the density and AI of the traffic is striking.

Cars slam-on the brakes with split-second precision and pile-ups are a regular, glorious sight (if a pain in the behind). Learner Driver It's in multiplayer that we realise how important your selection of camera is, too. From the three staple choices of third-person, smashing anything that blocks our way.

Boost does exactly what you'd expect, providing a short, sharp burst of speed that comes in handy for catching up to particularly fast getaway drivers.

These abilities and upgrades are just the tip of the iceberg, apparently. As the first chapter comes to a close (we're told it's around a tenth of the whole game), we're left itching for more mischief and midtown madness. Lucky for us, then, that we can revisit the multiplayer mode we caught a glimpse of last year.

Trail Blazer has you battling other players to draft behind an AI-controlled vehicle on the run through a fixed portion of the city. You can all Shift, of course, which means this is no ordinary survival of the fastest. Blazing a trail through traffic-jammed streets is exhilarating enough as it is but with all four players Shifting between vehicles, it becomes nail-biting and terrifying.

Picking out the right engine for the job is crucial and brings a new level of strategy to the game of cat-and-mouse. In this case, the bigger the better, and we manage to Shift into a truck a few streets ahead of the action which we then use to lie in wait for the target.

Once drafting behind it, we're home free, blocking out the competition and sealing a victory by racking up the slip-streaming points. It's much more polished and robust than our last encounter with it and the density and AI of the traffic is striking. Cars slam-on the brakes with split-second precision and pile-ups are a regular, glorious sight (if a pain in the behind).

CRASH TEST
Leroux explains the timeless appeal of the series' handling and realism by, unsurprisingly, drawing further comparisons with its movie inspirations: "The brand is based on incredibly strong and stylish elements that are themselves timeless, and particularly well-suited to a videogame.

The classic Hollywood car chase; the cop buddy movie; those were cool in the '70s, and they are still cool today," she explains. "When I think back on my experience with the first Driver game, it was one of those moments when you realise you've just taken the next step forward in a medium, kind of like how Jurassic Park made you feel about CG.

In Driver I felt a new level of responsiveness and fun from the way the controls and handling behaved. Over a decade later, the medium has leaped forward and we've come to expect higher standards across the board in games, but I can't say that I've really found that exceptional handling anywhere else; it's still unparalleled. And of course, like Driver's influences, that visceral feeling is also something that will never go out of style." On this showing, she's got a point.

It's easy to forget the first Driver game made its debut over a decade ago. After a few hands-on rounds of Trail Blazer multiplayer (we win some, we lose lots), Shifting is second-nature. It's such a refreshingly original concept, and so simply, stylishly executed, that it's easy to forget how difficult the road to the finished product has been for the team.

"One source of the challenges we've faced has been the fact that no compromises were made on the project's ambition," says Leroux. "There were ambitious goals on all fronts at once: creative, presentational and technical. As you already know, we set out to make a game that ran at 60fps, where one could Shift into any car anywhere and at any time - without loading.

Additionally, we set out to do this on the first game made with the current engine. We also set our sights on telling an involving and compelling story, happening on several levels, Inception-style, all without the player getting out of the car. We made the choice to build a real city rather than a fictional one, when the latter would have allowed us more liberties in terms of level design, frame-rate, etc.

"And of course this game had to live up to the usual high Ubisoft standards in terms of graphical polish and strong art direction. Hitting the mark on all those ambitions combined didn't leave a lot of space for trade-offs, and we didn't take the easy road on any front, so there were no smooth rides on any of them."

Without giving too much away we're told to expect a number of "surprises" - both in the single-player missions and multiplayer modes when the game finally arrives later this year. There's a lot of exploration to be done around the sprawling, maze-like streets that cover all terrain and all sorts of ways of getting across it. But the real surprise is that Reflections' commitment to its original, much-maligned, concept seems to have paid-off.

The idea, however crazy on paper, works, and it works very well indeed, delivering something quite unlike anything else out there right now. It's familiar enough to bring back fond memories of the series' golden years, and original enough to stand out from the competition. Tanner may be comatose, but the Driver brand, once again, is alive and kicking.

[Words: Games Master]

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