The Getaway

""We're gonna play a little game...""

"We're gonna play a little game..."

And so Mark Hammond wakes up, tied to a chair, which a black eye, a sore head, and probably a few broken ribs, and is blackmailed into running round London causing gang wars, while DC Frank Carter is forced to sort out the chaos left behind.

Ok, call me a little late, I've been meaning to write a review of this game for ages. It might have finally taken me 5 years to actually write it, but it's here now, eventually, a bit like the game, which was delayed by weeks, then months, and then years until the end of 2002, when The Getaway was finally unleashed onto the public. After being much hyped and heavy promoted, it has since shifted 3 million copies, and has probably paid back some of the £5 million it cost to produce.

Where the 5 million smackers went however must have been in the background staff and Team Soho keeping Jessops in trade by buying all their camera film to take millions of pictures of London, cause half it didn't go into the game. Maybe I'm being a little harsh, because I do love The Getaway as a game, but I'm not blinded too much to see through its flaws, and my, aren't there a lot of them!

First things first, the game is meant to have a cinematic movie feel to it, hence the lack of health bar, map and any other on screen clutter. Which is good, and it can also be very bad. Also, there are no health kits for you to take to heal yourself when you get to badly damaged, instead when your character starts staggering around, one arm clutching onto his stomach, while the other one limply holds a gun, and is shaky when aiming to shoot someone, that is the time you find yourself a wall and stand by it. Your character will lean by it, and breathe heavily for a few moments. You'll know he's done when stops leaning by the wall, and stands up straight with a swagger. I actually quite like this system of healing, it takes a bit of the frustration out of playing a game, realising you're out of painkillers, and you're about to enter a room of armed mobsters, and you die straight away, with this you can just step back, take some time out, and pray that no sneaky bugger is going to shoot you in the back.

Driving however is a different matter. With no map, apart from the paper one that's with the game, which is next to useless, the makers decided that you would have to know where you are going, cue the indication system which is unique only to The Getaway. It should be a simple idea, turn left or right depending where the indicator flashes, if only life was so. Unfortunately, the route you often follow involves going down one way streets the wrong way, and crashing into a lot of traffic. It isn't too bad if you are playing as DC Frank Carter because at least you can blare your sirens and cars move out the way, when you're playing as Mark Hammond, however, you can expect to have every police car in the surrounding area all over your backside! You can also expect to crash the motor you're in often, especially when doing the above, if you take a corner to fast you can expect to end up on the opposite side of the road, or into a lamp post/traffic lights/ fencing, or gang or police cars will try and ram you off the road, or shoot at your wheels. When the black smoke starts billowing out of your engine, it's time to jack another one, which is thankfully quite simple, unless you have three cop cars and two gangs chasing you, in which case, you can expect to have a fire fight before you boost another car, and make the er...well...getaway. The police in this game are either very stupid or really aggressive. If you are playing as Mark Hammond, they can, and will, chase you if they a) know what car you are driving, or b) see you committing some crime on the streets, mostly traffic ones. They can be annoying, but sometimes just getting to your destination if enough to get rid of them, especially if you trigger a cut scene. If you are driving as Frank Carter, expect no help what so ever unless you stop the middle of the road, and have a pitch fight with a gang. Also with the driving, it's important to bear in mind that different cars handle differently. Most of them are rubbish, and the ones that are any good at careering round corners are so rare, they are almost impossible to find! And when you do find one, expect to have wrecked it after a couple of shunts, leaving you to resort to the next best thing you can find, which is usually a London Hackney Cab.

The game controls are fairly simple, the R1 auto aim makes most missions a breeze, however you will find that sometimes it will aim for the baddie the furthest away, leaving the one nearest to you quite happy to pump you full of lead, though when it comes to stealth, it can get confusing on what button to press for what, and don't be surprised that if you press X to do a crouch, you end up doing a roll instead. Stealth missions can be really annoying and vague as what and where you're suppose to go, and in Mission 11, you will have to do all kind of acrobatic stunts just to get through some laser beams in a manor house, in which has to be the most annoying mission of them all. But least when you die during a Mission, and you will die often, you start at the beginning of that level, not the beginning of the Mission. But most of the missions are fun, there's something satisfying about being able to take out a swarm of baddies when a couple of rounds of a pistol. Also when you character runs, he will not being doing a Usain Bolt, instead he will jog along so slowly it would probably take him until next year to complete the London Marathon. Walking isn't much faster! You will find glitches though, like people getting stuck in pavements, guns you can't pick up even if you walk over them 50 times, and things not loading. Also, some of the AI is terrible, most bystanders on the streets have a death wish, and will run out in front of your car, and end up toast, especially if you are playing as Carter and have your sirens going. As for the camera…It stubbornly stays behind you, or will get stuck in one place, usually the side if you are by a crate or a wall. Using Manual aim to swing it around can help a little, but it's a nightmare, especially if you are trying to do Missions 11 and 14, and you actually need to camera to able to look around for danger without risking your character's life.

Which brings us onto the storyline. There are 24 missions in The Getaway, and you will play 12 of them as Mark Hammond, and 12 as DC Frank Carter. First you take the controls of Mark Hammond, a bank robber who has just had his wife killed and his son kidnapped in a blotched operation. He decides to get his son back, only to be told that if he doesn't do what crime lord Charlie Jolson wants, his son is dead. Most the Missions, apart from two, are good ole fashioned drive to A, enter building/yard, shoot everyone in your way, leave and drive to B. They can range from you being the little errand boy, like Mission 8, when you are required to go and pick up a lap dancer, to the downright insane, like killing off half the Met Police at Snow Hill Police Station in Mission 7. You do get the help of a side kick Yasmin in later Missions, which can be handy when wave after wave of gangster are coming at you, and you can also expect to get trouble from gangs and the police. After you complete Mark's missions, you then get to play as DC Frank Carter of The Flying Squad. Here's a useless fact for you, the Flying Squad get their name from the fact that they were the first Police unit in London to have cars, and therefore they could "fly" after villains, and my, won't you be flying playing as Carter, especially at the end of Mission 13 when you have to get your partner to hospital, and the beginning of Mission 15 when you have to get to Soho from the other side of London in 5 minutes. For reasons that are never made clear during the game, Carter is obsessed with bring down the Jolsons. You will be doing a lot more Stealth as Carter, than as Mark, and if you are on a police operation, you will receive help from your fellow officers, which usually involves them trying to kill every last gangster, and you mopping up the leftovers. You will also receive some quite horrible Missions as well, such as the beginning of Mission 17. However Carter's missions tend to be a lot shorter than those of Hammond's. You can expect to be spending somewhere between 10 - 30 hours in front of you PS2 trying to complete the whole thing.

There is a lot of swearing in The Getaway, a hell of a lot. It would make readers of The Daily Mail blush. It's almost as though the script editor looked through it and thought we need more F words, and added them wherever they could, because some of it, and this is speaking from a writer's point of view, sits easily in sentences, and some of it sounds like it was thrown in for good measure, and can, at times, jar the dialogue. The storyline is engaging, and it certainly has the gritty realism that the makers were going for. The acting is good, most the cast speak with Cockney accents, so presumably the makers marched down to the set of Eastenders (For those of you who don't live in the UK, and therefore have not had the pleasure of this most depressing half an hour of TV, it's a soap set in the East End of London) and nicked half the cast, be warned though, sometimes, if you have the subtitles on, what the Yardies say, and what it comes up written can be two completely different things. I actually think that the guy who plays Carter is the better actor than the bloke who plays Hammond, who at times, is just plain wooden. The graphics are a strange mix. In the Cut scenes, they look really good, I'm guessing that Team Soho filmed the scenes like you would a movie, and rendered them through some 3D machine, though some of the facial expressions haven't been caught, and anything that is lower that the waist, like legs and the end of jumpers looks slightly odd. In the actually game play, while close up wall, shops, etc… look amazing and really detailed, the background can look a bit blurry, but you should still be able to make out famous landmarks such as Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace and the London Eye.

The free roam mode is a tad boring, for some odd reason, the driving to missions seems to be more exciting that just driving around London for the sake of it. Presumably, it was put in there to make you want to finish playing the game, though since you drive around London in most the Missions anyway, even the pull of finding secret cars is hardly enough.

Despite all its flaws, there is something about The Getaway that I love. Maybe it's because it's trying to be different, or maybe it's the storyline and characters, I don't know, but it has a certain charm about it. Yes, it has it's faults, but you have to admire Team Soho for what they were trying to do, which was create a game that was probably trying to redefine the genre. In sheer production values, they succeeded, and maybe if they hadn't tried to rush the game out so fast, they could have ironed out the quirks and flaws, they would have achieved their goal, but I still have an urge to play it again and again, and often do.

Overall, in terms of storyline, it's a great game, in terms of actually playing it's good, but very linear based, think of a game more like Mafia, and not GTA, so don't enter into The Getaway thinking that's what you are getting because you will be disappointed, but I'm going to give this 8/10.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/09

Game Release: The Getaway (EU, 12/11/02)