The Getaway

"Five years to arrive in my PS2, five days to leave it forever."

Hands up those of you who've been looking forward to this for ages, since those first gorgeous looking screenshots appeared in the magazines and on the web. Who got increasingly excited when they found out that they weren't looking at pictures of the FMV sequences, but ACTUAL IN-GAME FOOTAGE? Who among you bought Vice City, but all the while thought to yourself ''The Getaway's going to be so much cooler than this''? Am I the only one with my hand still up?

The Getaway is a maddening game. It takes it's cues mainly from Driver, GTA, and the Guy Ritchie films, pulling you in with a great intro sequence and some first class crap Mockney accents. The game's central character, Mark Hammond, who is a retired criminal, wakes up one morning to find that his wife has been murdered and his son has been kidnapped by his old boss. He is just in time to see the kidnappers drive away, so he gives chase. It is at this point that you join the action. You control Mark as he carries out various tasks for his former employer in the seemingly vain hopes of getting his kid back. When you finish the game, you can play again in the role of cop Frank Carter, to get a different perspective on events.

Two things struck me when I first took control of the game. The first was ''Wow, these graphics are pretty special'', and this is certainly true. The cars are all real vehicles you would expect to see driving around England, even including Royal Mail vans and FedEx trucks and stuff. My second thought was ''Blimey, the screen's empty.'' And I don't mean that literally. What I mean is that there is no on-screen maps or icons at all. No life-bar, no ammo gauge or anything. In doing this, the game is trying to come across as 'realistic'. However, this just does not work.

One of the best, and most overlooked features of the two most recent GTA games, was that you could instantly see what's to the side of you and what's behind you after a quick touch of the shoulder buttons. In The Getaway, once you get in your car, you are given a viewpoint just outside and above the back of the car. And that's it. You cannot change the viewpoint and you cannot look to the side. You can only look behind you if you reverse up the street long enough for the game to decide that you really should be looking behind you (which usually takes about 10 seconds), at which point the camera will obligingly swing around to give you a reverse view. Except, you'll almost never get to see this view because you'll crash into another car or a lamp-post because the game wouldn't show you where you were going quick enough. That's realistic, then.

These viewpoint problems continue once you get out of your car as well. There is no 'free look' mode, unless you aim your gun at something, except you can't do that because any passing cops will be on your case (and you can bet they'll always be around when you don't need them).

As I mentioned above, there is also no in-game map. There are also no signs anywhere to give you the remotest idea of how to get around. The way the game tells you where to go is by having your car indicators flash to tell you which turning you should be taking, and then having your hazard lights flash when you reach your destination. But finding out exactly what you should be doing when you reach your destination (like if you should even leave your car) is a nightmare.

Apparently the layout of London is spot-on, according to a friend of mine. He said that even the shops are in the right places. Which should make getting around easy for London-dwellers. The rest of the world will have problems though. I've been to London a dozen times or so, but I always travel by Tube, so my sense of geography at street level doesn't extend beyond a vague sense of ''Oh look, there's Hyde Park. I think that means that Buckingham Palace is nearby.'' If you want to know where you are at any given point, then unless you know London inside out, you'll have to keep driving until you reach a famous landmark. There's a map included in the box, which is a nice idea, but when you don't know where you are to begin with, it becomes kind of redundant.

There is a certain amount of fun to be had with this game, but almost all of it involves the driving side of things. It's pretty fun to be involved in a high speed chase down Oxford Street (though the words 'speed' and Oxford Street' don't often find themselves in the same sentence in real life), escaping from the cops, only to be chased down by one of the gangs you've angered during the course of the game. The on-foot sections (which on their own make up a good two thirds of the game) amount to little more than elaborate memory tests. The bad guys always crop up in the same places, so skill plays second fiddle to your recollection of what went wrong the last time through.

It's a terrible shame. I really wanted to like this game, but so many little flaws are present as to make the game almost completely unenjoyable. It really bugs me when developers try to make their games realistic, especially when so many things conspire to make the whole affair UNrealistic (like if Mark gets shot five times in the chest with a revolver, he need only lean against a wall for 20 seconds to be right as rain again).

It's true to say that I had some fun while playing this, but it's also equally true to say that every time I turned the game off, it was out of frustration. You should give this a play, if only to see how well London has been recreated, but don't go and spend your hard-earned money on it.

THE GOOD BITS
The graphics are really excellent, and the plot, characters and acting are pretty good as well. The driving sections are really good fun (especially when you work out where you should be going). You can shoot while running (are you listening, Vice City?). There's an auto-save option.

THE BAD BITS
You can't save mid-mission. Occasional graphical faults (cars vanishing into thin air, the ability to sometimes drive through lamp-posts as if they weren't there). Stupid camera system. You can't skip the cut-scenes, so if you turn the game off midway through a mission, and then come back to it later, you have to sit through the lengthy cut-scenes that precede it. See also my points about realism.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/10/03, Updated 01/10/03