PS2 owners have been awaiting the release of The Getaway in the same way fundamentalist Christians await the second coming of Christ. Screenshots were first made public a couple of months after the console's release, and ever since then there has been a massive sense of anticipation - could it ever live up to it's hype ?
The answer is both yes, and no.
The Story is played out from two different perspectives, both of which you get to play, and both of which interact with each other as they take place simultaneously.
In the first part, you play Mark Hammond, low life gangster scumbag, fresh out of jail. His wife is murdered and his son kidnapped by henchmen of Crime Boss Charlie Jolson. Thus Jolson blackmails Hammond into carrying out a variety of multi task missions for him as Hammond becomes public enemy number one as he battles to get back his son.
In the second part you play Detective Frank Carter of the Flying Squad, your typical maverick copper with no respect for authority. Carter's missions generally occur in the aftermath of the carnage created by Hammond, although the stories often cross when Hammond and Carter begin working together.
The voice acting is brilliant, real actors, real Londoner's, real story, and the FMV's are the best that have ever been seen on any game so far (although it can be annoying that you cannot skip them). The story has an incredible cinematic quality,, and you feel like you are playing a part in a Guy Ritchie movie.
Also, on the positive side, the game boasts truly beautiful graphics - at least hi-spec PC standard, with realtime lighting and shadows, beautiful car models and incredibly detailed scenery. The first thing that strikes you when you open the box up up is the map that comes with the game, the area of London that is photographically reproduced is simply MASSIVE !
There is no popup, very little slowdown - even with 30 plus vehicles onscreen at the same time. In fact the game runs frighteningly fast.
The game tries to opt for realism too, your car's performance degrades pretty quickly after afew big bangs, and smoke pours from the engine before eventually bursting into flames.
The car models are stunning, they really do look like the real thing.
Also too, there's no cartoon-esque fliying through the air and getting up when a car hits you, ONE hit and you are dead ! Similarly when your character is shot he very quickly becomes incapacitated and can hardly walk, this can be resolved by standing near a wall and resting.
The police are also frighteningly intelligent, as are the gangsters who accost you on the streets. Although I was abit aghast that the British Bobby's would open fire on me for brushing my car against a lamppost ! They lay down stingers, set up roadblocks, pull up alongside you and shoot your tyres out. You WILL scream at them with using the same four letter words that the game's characters use (-:
But be warned, this game is not for the sensitive and the politically correct, this game really does deserve it's 18 rating. There are scenes of torture, brutality, incessant violence, all with a relentless undercurrent of racist invective directed at the West Indian Yardies, and the Chinese Triads by the white characters.
The "out of car" part of the game is also extremely well done, it is part "Metal Gear Solid" (back to the wall, skulking in the shadows) and part "Max Payne" (diving rolls with guns a-blazing). But even better (cough) you get to grab any person near you an use them as a human shield !! Finished with them ? Then snap their necks or blow their brains out with your gun ! Told you it was violent.
It's full of neat and yet cruel little touches, for example in one of Carter's missions you are in the hospital on Tottenham Court Road protecting your partner who was shot earlier. You can wander into the other hospital wards, see those people in the beds attached to life support machines ? Hear the "beep beep beep" of the machines ? Well, why not shoot the life support machines, or shoot the patients themselves and hear them flatline ! :-)
On the negative side.
First thing you will notice are the way the vehicles react to the controls. You will expect GTA3 style vehicle performance, and you will curse when you don't get this. But calm down, you'll soon get used to the "realistic" car performance. And the second thing you will notice is how damned hard the game is ! You'll be swearing at every lamppost and bollard you crash into, cursing every copper who gets too close to you and handcuffs you on the floor. But bear with the game and you will get used to it.
There is NO ingame map !!!! How crazy is that !! The designers decided not to clutter the onscreen display with information of ANY kind, the directions you need to take in the vehicles are decided by your vehicles indicator lights. There is not even an onscreen compass so you know which direction to go. Unless you have an enyclopaedic knowledge of London streets then you WILL get lost very quickly. One mission sees Carter at a Docks near Tower Bridge, and he is called to a disturbance in Soho (right across the other end of London), and he says he will be there in 5 minutes !!!! In the packed and twisting narrow streets of London, this is nigh on impossible without a Gameshark cheat cartridge.
Probably most disappointing of all this that once you have completed the game, all you unlock is "freelook" mode, where you can cruise the streets of London at your leisure. It is now that you quickly find out that the environment has no interactivity to it at all. You CANNOT visit ANY London attraction because they are all fenced off for no reason I can think of ! Why can't I walk upto the Millenniuum Wheel ? Why does it have a big fence around it ? Why cant I crash my bus through the gates of Buckingham Palace and have a snoop around ? No reason at all except that the designers decided that you couldn't do anything that was faintly interesting and it all seems pretty petty.
It is now that you realise that the game possesses the same kind of "empty" quality that "Driver" and "Driver 2" had. All this beautiful scenery to look at, but nothing you can do with it except admire it from a distance. This is where "GTA3" and "GTA Vice" score big, because once the missions were over then the game really began in earnest and the environment truly was interactive.
But in "Getaway" you are hemmed into what the designers want you to do and see, and this is why I took my copy back to get a refund.
Team Soho - the designers have spent many years creating their own game engine which is in every way superior to "GTA3"'s "Rendaware" engine, but I believe they were forced to release the game early for the Xmas market and so it seems only 75% finished. With the massive amount of money invested in this game there will surely be a franchise created, and I think that the next game in the series will be something truly extraordinary that will make the gaming world really sit up and take notice. All the potential is already there in this game, it just needs more GTA3 style interactivity.
I would say, RENT this game before you buy.
