The Getaway

Let's get one thing straight: You can steal cars, you perpetrate crimes and you shoot people. Lots of people. But aside from those similarities, this game bears little semblance to the GTA series. While the GTA games give you a arcade feeling, The Getaway is meant to be as real as possible. There's no screen junk like maps, health bars, ammo counter or anything. You are guided by the blinking indicators on your car and your health is gauged by the way you move and the blood on your suit. The controls are acceptable, but not as tight as they could be. Controlling the cars is much more enjoyable than GTA3 or GTA:VC. Unlike in GTA:VC and preceding games, you can only target hostile opponents, which saves ammo and frustration in a fire fight. The on foot engine has stealth. Hide against walls, pop out around corners, etc. You can take hostages and use them as a shield. Opponents may not fire if the hostage is important. Cops, however, will NEVER fire at a hostage. The weapon selection is limited, you can get pistols, a shotgun, an AK47 and MP5s. Be warned, this game definitely mature. Plenty of course language, stark violence and some other mature themes. Overall, it's a great game.

this game is very fun to play. the game is stylish. the story is good too. real cars are included like saab, BMW etc. First you play mark hammond whose's son is kidnapped by the jolsons after you have completed the game then you play the policeman frank carter who is also with in the story and you play with his point of view. when you have completed the game, you play play free roam where you can explore London but not whole. the game is not like other games that when you're wounded, you need to find a heart and you can carry many weapons as you like, in this game you can rest against a wall to recover yourself and you can have max two pistols and a two-hand weapon. but still the crew should have put abit more effort in it but overall: 8/10

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

"The Getaway" is not a video game version of the Sam Peckinpah heist flick or even of the Walter Hill remake. It's a British gangster movie in the vein of Guy Ritchie's "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels". Or is it a video game? It certainly seems like a movie, but it's not.

For years, game developers have been wanting to create a so-called "interactive movie". A product with the look and feel of a motion picture, but one where the viewer is totally in control of. For the most part, they've failed miserably, as is the case of the horrible FMV titles from the Sega CD days.

However, most recently, programmers have come close to such a thing, just play "Max Payne" and you'll realize how much game makers have evolved the concept. Still, I've never played one such as "The Getaway", a gritty, in-your-face gangster opus with characters that use the "F" word so many times that you would think Quentin Tarantino had something to with the script.

In fact, like Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction", the story of "The Getaway" is structured in a very nonlinear way. The two central characters, an ex-gangster who's been pulled back into the "life" and a rogue cop share the spotlight in telling the tale from their own different perspective.

It's us, the players, who could use some help controlling these characters in putting them to good use. As great as the "movie" is, it's the game's controls that need to be polished. Moving these two characters around is, for the most part, a chore. In the name of "realism", the makers have decided to get rid of the usual standard for video games.

There are no health bars (you look tired as you get shot), no maps of the city (London) you constantly drive in or even direction indicators (you have to rely on your turn signals). This is a bold move on part of the makers, because we gamers love games because of the very reason that they get us away from realism. We don't really care for realism in video games. At least the way it's played out in this product. It makes for a very frustrating game expierence.

The reason the "Grand Theft Auto" games are so fun and addicting is the way it constantly relys on a "virtual" world. "The Getaway" is the opposite, I know most players will look at this as a "Grand Theft Auto" ripoff, but it's far from the truth. "GTA" is a parody of recent American gangster pictures, "The Getaway" is a dark, unnerving action game that isn't comical in any way. Its a step in the right direction in bringing the "interactive movie" to life. In that way, it works, but there still is room for improvement.

I'd give it *** out of **** (Good)

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.