The Getaway

I'm not going to fool around, i'll get right into the review.

Story: 9/10

Mark Hammond, a retired Collins gangster from Soho, has recently been released from prison and is now managing his own night club in central London. He has a wife (Suzie) and one son (Alex). His life is brilliant and he is in a great position. But one day his life turns from brilliant to horrid. Early one morning an old rival of the Bethnal Green Mob, Charlie Jolson, kills his wife and kidnaps his son. Mark immediately hears the gun shots and rushes to the street to find Suzie dying. As on lookers scream, Mark rushes to his car to chase after the Bethnal Green Mob through an early rush hour in London. This starts the longest day Mark will ever remember. The story advances with excellent twists which i won't spoil for you. There's also D.C. Frank Carter, a detective working at Snow Hill for D.C.I McCormack. He's been working on a case to bring Charlie and Jake Jolson into prison. You can play as both characters.What can i say? The story is supreme, however a bit unoriginal. Still, it definitely creates enough tension to keep you playing through the game from the first level to the 24th level.

Graphics: 9/10

Wow. The graphics are amazing and compete along side 'Metal Gear Solid 2' and 'Rachet and Clank'. Just look at the screen shots. The characters details are amazing and the streets look real. If that's not enough, you just have to switch on Progressive Scan Mode (Only on certain TVs - I haven't seen the results) which i can only imagine make the graphics 10 out of 10 quality. So why 9? Of course, with over 500,000 digital photos put in the game as textures the quality of the buildings had to be dimmed down. Also, often the graphics are slow to appear or just lag in certain areas of London. To sum it up - The game uses every ounce of power the Playstation 2 gives away.

Gameplay: 8/10

There's a hell of a lot of things to mention, but the most clear thing is that's there's no on screen details. Team Soho have very cleverly worked around this to give it more of a realistic/movie feel. There's no on screen map which will be noticed first. This has brilliantly been worked around and you navigate your way around London by using the vehicle's indicators which will automatically flash telling you what to do. Great, huh? Another obvious loss is the health bar. Now this one is amazing. Each time the character is injured, bloodstains will appear on his clothes and he will be visually crippled, limping around or dragging himself. This is a huge step up in games. On most other games you can be on 1% of health and the character will look the same as it does at 100%. There's also no ammunition notification. The only sign of this is the controller vibration when you have no ammo left. All this does make the game a lot harder than it would be if there was on screen detail, however, you get used to it very, very quickly.

Some of you may be disappointed with the skinny weapon range. This includes a Baseball Bat, Police Baton, a Crowbar, a Knife, Pistols (Also dual pistols), Shotguns, an AK-47 and some nice MP5s (Also available as dual). Yes, it's skinny, but i guarantee you won't notice with the amazing gun fights and gang wars going on. To make up for the small range of weapons there's a massive range of movements to do with stealth. The most important in the game has to be the wall lean which leads to the jump out movement, blind gun shot movement, jump out shots and wall to wall stealth. You can also do all this behind small boxes while crouching too. But that's not all. There's rolling and hostage taking (Which leads to immediate shot, neck breaking, pistols whip and arrests) which are really fun. Add this to the game detail, the gun range and such, and you can shoot gas cannisters underneath stairs to make the stairs collapse and poison gas in the hospitals which can poison enemies. Awesome, huh?I can only find a few flaws in the game. The major one is the camera. It's quite awful, you have to manually move it often, unfortunately. However, i got over this quickly but i realized many other people haven't. This one flaw prevented this game from getting 10/10 in the Official Playstation 2 Magazine UK. Just to show off more, there's around 50 fully licensed vehicles in the game (Like Mazdas, Rovers and even TVRs and Lotus')! There's also 10 great hidden cars. There's a hell of a lot more in depth things, like in the car chases.. But if you buy 'The Getaway', you'll find out.

Rent or Buy?

I noticed that on some of the games forums that some people love the game and some people hate the game. This is why i'll call it 'The Marmite Of Video Games'. The reason for this is because they expect a copy of 'Grand Theft Auto'. Well, you're all wrong, as you hopefully just noticed. The two games shouldn't even be in the same category. Try and catch a demo, if you can. Failing that, rent it, and decide for yourself.

• Luke Hudson

I really liked this one for starters. It was well worth the wait and well worth the attention as well.

• The graphics in the game, in my opinion, were very good. I can see how the game makers and designers at Sony Computer Entertainment America and Team Soho made the levels very unique and challenging because you have to reach your destination by following the indicators on the tail lights of your car, and then when they both flash, that means you've reached your destination. I think that this was a very nice touch because it feels so real and all the places you go to are all real as well, and not in some kind of "made-up" place that the game makers and designers thought up of.

• The controls in the game, in my opinion, are pretty good. I know that it can be a bit irritating at most times, because you never know when you're gonna run out of ammo because, again, they don't have a display for that. But, then I realized that you'll know when you're running low after you've been firing the pistol, shotgun or assault rifle a lot of times, and then you feel the controller vibrate. That's when you know it's time to reload. The driving controls for the game were also good as well.

• The voice-acting in the game, in my opinion, was very good. I can see now why it said on the back of the case, "Cast of professional actors", because every single actor and actress gave a really good performance in the entire game right up 'til the end. Just amazing.

• The dialogue in the game, in my opinion, was also very good. There's no scenes of empty dialogue anywhere throughout the entire game and I think that the dialogue was very detailed and very well-written.

• The cars in the game, in my opinion, were very good as well. Just make sure that you don't go flying at a rapid speed, then what happens is that your car would catch smoke and if a front or a rear tire is flat, then you'd be swerving around all over the place, which is kind of annoying at most times, but other than that, the cars are very good to handle and get around with.

• The gameplay in the game, lastly, in my opinion, was really good, too. I find that the idea of you having to drive to a certain place and it takes you a little while to get there and then you can shoot up different people there for a little while too, whether you were Mark Hammond or Frank Carter, it was fun, and nothing but fun.

Some action-driving players may feel unusual about the idea of a game that has no map or a bullet screen or an arrow to show you where to go next, but, I have to say that this game is definitely one of the best driving/shooting adventure games I've played in a long time, right up there with Grand Theft Auto.

I definitely would recommend this to anyone who's looking for a real fun challenge in a really fun game.

With all of that said, I give "The Getaway",

9 stars out of 10.

While playing The Getaway, it is almost impossible not to compare this with Vice City. The real difference is how I perceived both games. In GTAVC, I was wondering just how they fit all the different elements, including 103 songs, 30 weapons, around 50 missions, and a massive city all in a disc. In The Getaway, I was wondering just what took up so much space that they could only include 5 weapons, 24 missions and hardly any secret elements or cheats. If the PS2 is capable of storing all the things put into GTAVC, what was all the work put into in The Getaway? The answer is probably the city itself and the large amount of very cool-looking cutscenes that are needed. The city is 40 sq. kilometers, and the cutscenes, all together, are apparently more than an hour long. Still, they could have made this game much more fun if they had added some side missions and made it less linear. Nonetheless, a fun game for the few days it takes to finish.

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.

For the first time, a game like this actually has a point, has suspense, and keeps you entertained with hard as hell missions. this game is truly unique, and I suggest people either play it or read up on it. I mean, if you like crime movies or crime novels, you will most certainly enjoy this game. Long live the ultra-violent crime games!