The Getaway

"Some tea leaf's half-inched me plates of meat"

James Dean, Paul Gascoigne, Jim Morrison.

Through death, drink and drugs (and death), three of the world's most talented individuals tragically failed to fulfill their true potential.
You can add The Getaway to that list. Like the aforementioned names, it shows glimpses of genius, but you can't help feeling it should have been so much better.

But first, a hearty round of applause is required for the damned thing actually getting finished. Some sceptics said it would never see the light of day. But you don't spend five million pound without attempting to recoup some of your investment, and here is the end result.
Ever since those initial screens had us all squinting and tilting our heads a bit to see is it really was a game or a computer manipulated photograph, The Getaway has caused more debate than Britney Spears' alleged virginity. How realistic is it? How much of London does it cover? Will you be able to pop into McDonalds for a Big Mac and fries? Are there ladies touting for business at Kings Cross? Does everyone stomp about yelling ''Shut it you slag''? As the days and months turned into years and the budget grew larger than Michael Jackson's surgery bill, all of these these questions have remained unanswered...until now.

If you live in London, have lived in London or even visited the crime ridden, vermin infested capital for a bit of pre-Christmas shopping down Oxford Street once in your lifetime, the novelty value of this game is incalculable. Hours can be wasted simply cruising the streets and taking in The Getaway's astonishing attention to detail while attempting to locate familiar landmarks. It's one of those rare games that you want everyone to see. It's one of those games that's fun to play without actually playing it. Just hop in, rev up and go see the sights.

But, of course, the novelty soon wears off. Sooner than anticipated, to be perfectly honest - but then again, I'm not a Londoner, or a Brit. Then there's a game to be played, a kid to be saved, a crime boss to be punished and a few hundred corpses to be disposed of. The Getaway wears its Long Good Friday, Lock Stock heritage proudly with an 18 certificate on the box, a cast of Tourettes sufferers and the kind of indiscriminate violence that only occurs in Quentin Tarantino nightmares. When the F-ing starts and the guns go off, it gets messy.

The story centers on the unfortunate plight of Mark Hammond, an ex-con trying to go straight with the love of a good woman and a small offspring. But when Charlie Jolson (big bald chap with a penchant for shooters, strippers and swearing) gets involved, Hammond's entire world goes fruity, green and considerably wide at the bottom. It begins with the murder of his wife and the kidnap of his young boy. Using the little fella as bait, crime boss Jolson then gets Hammond to carry out throughout the city with the threat of ten minced little fingers and toes constantly hanging over him.

It's this tightly scripted narrative that immediately distinguishes The Getaway from its partner in crime Grand Theft Auto. The free-roaming feature of GTA is replaced with more linear, story driven gameplay, and clearly a great deal of time has been invested in creating a storyline that unfolds in similar fashion to a movie. Hours of voice recordings, reams of script and the obligatory motion-captured body movements all combine to present lengthy story scenes that are genuinely amusing, but perhaps not for all the right reasons.

For instance, the swearing is so OTT and unnecessary, and the cockney accents are so horribly forced that it produces fits of laughter every time I hear the game running (I'm not the only one who plays games around the house you know). This, I imagine, was not the desired effect.
It doesn't quite look right, either. The character movements are stilted and unnatural - it's as if the developer is hovering somewhere above and pulling strings attached to each characters' limbs. Instead of watching Guy Ritchie movies and 'borrowing' certain bits, they should have been watching MGS2 and seeing how in-game cut-scenes are properly done.

Delving into the game, you'll find that missions are pretty evenly split between driving like a maniac and shooting like a complete psycho. Usually they take the form of racing to a location, carrying out a job and then getting the hell out of there before the rozzers turn up.
Careering your wheels around town in The Getaway is a much more realistic affair than in GTA. Launch your motor into a handbrake turn and the chances of screeching off into the distance are pretty slim. it's a much more exacting driving experience with your twitchy machine needing gentle nudges to weave between traffic and avoid the numerous obstacles. It's not easy.

Part of the difficulty is down to the claustrophobic nature of England's capitol's streets. There's none of GTA's three lane freeways and wide sweeping bends here. It's all tight back alleys, traffic-clogged high streets and fender bending objects just where you don't want them to be.
But this illusion of reality is dealt a hammer blow to the head when you collide with a bus stop, lamp post or fencing at 90 mph without so much as denting them, while your motor is left in pieces. Maybe they're made out of kryptonite - your controller will need to be, as the frustration level escalates and you write-off you vehicle for the umpteenth time against an implausibly solid scenery object. Soon you'll learn to loathe these barriers with the same venom usually reserved for traffic wardens.

Unfortunately the in-car sections feel a bit wasted as there's a serious lack of variety when you get into the driving seat. Most of the objectives involve simply getting from A to B without getting nicked, which in gaming terms means driving down a succession of streets following your flashing indicators until you reach a certain destination. There's no street map to allow you to work out your own route. The indicators flash when you're trying to avoid oncoming traffic, cop cars and lamp posts. Things are made even more testing if you get rammed from behind and have your lights shattered. Even if you're a professional cabbie there's no way to use handy short cuts because you're not sure of where to go until the little blinking lights get you. It's a shame you're not given the chance to make your own way through the streets. A dirty shame.

When a job that's a bit different comes along, the general lack of diversity is only made even more apparent. Chasing a prison van and trying to ram it off the road is a rare occasion when you can ignore those little orange lights and concentrate on having some frantic, destructive fun. But after that it's back to following a path through London set by the game developers. With such a tight narrative it's more than acceptable for the overall game to be rigidly linear, but giving the player so little freedom within the missions is a major failing. It leaves you with the feeling that you're being led by the hand through the entire game. If you didn't actually fire the gun or press the accelerator it'd be like watching a movie on your PS2. And I don't mean that in a good way.

This feeling of helplessness as you're shunted along the game conveyor belt continues through the sections where you get out of the car and dish out some hot lead retribution. Make sure you really enjoy driving through London and really soak up the pleasure you get from nicking real cars, smashing them up and leaving the coppers for dead as you motor off into the sunset. When you open that car door and step out onto those grimy London streets, The Getaway goes downhill fast. Your character's movement is decidedly clumsy to put it mildly. Get shot a few times because you got stuck in a corner looking at a wall and you won't be so forgiving or polite. Just trying to turn him in the opposite direction is a massive chore as he sets off in some idiotic circular motion rather than just spinning around to face the opposite way. As you progress you'll learn to work around these faults, but you're still left with the feeling that you're battling against poor controls as well as gangs of criminals.

Everything conspires to make shoot-outs an anger boiling chore. The camera takes an age to give you the view you want, so you end up spending lots of time maneuvering clumsy old Mark into a suitable position. By this time you may well be full of holes. Entering a room is far more life-threatening than it should be, because there's no way to progress other than by stepping blindly forward and taking hits until the camera finally lets you see just where the bullets are coming from. An auto-aim helps matters, but even that tends to lock on to enemies way off in the distance while the bloke right in front of you pumps away with a sawn-off. Getting through the game is an exercise in patience and making the best of a bad situation.

When everything comes together there are some damn good set pieces and incredibly tense shootouts. Hammond's penchant for twin handguns will leave you feeling like someone out of reservoir Dogs as you pump bullets through the windscreen of a patrol car while yanking an unsuspecting driver out of his gleaming Rover. AK47s, sawn-off shotguns and rive-by shootings are just some of the evil delights on offer. Then, just as you're starting to live with its numerous flaws, something utterly infuriating and completely idiotic rams home to the magnitude of The Getaway's on-foot failings.

At one point I had to infiltrate Charlie's mansion and my progress was barred by a series of security lasers. Fair enough, plenty of home lasers to keep out burglars. But they're not usually arranged in such a way that only Crash Bandicoot could leap, roll and jump through them. A serious shooting game reduced to platform-style puzzling is bad enough, but when you've got a lead character with the maneuverability of a drunken blind man with two broken ankles, it's just plain infuriating. Moments like this only highlight what a mixed bag The Getaway is.

I can live with the clichéd script and embarrassing voice acting. Just about. What concerns me more is the ropy character animation (especially noticeable when playing the running around bits), the badly executed shooting system and the immense frustration as you smash your motor or get riddled with bullets because of a flawed game mechanic rather than your own inadequacy as a gamer.
But perhaps the biggest problem is the competition, a little game by the name of GTA Vice City. I wanted The Getaway to be good. I wanted a more evenly fought contest between the two. But if you've got $50 smoldering in your pocket there really is only one choice. Slag.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/08/03, Updated 02/09/03