The Getaway Review

They don't get much more "love it or hate it" than The Getaway, a game that's noteworthy for at least a couple of reasons. It's an ambitious project that reportedly cost a fortune to produce and was many years in the making, and it's one of the most earnest attempts to date at being an interactive movie. It also features some of the most ruthless violence and most excessive swearing yet seen in a game, and it takes place in what's at least a visually realistic re-creation of modern-day London, right down to scores of real-world vehicles driving bumper-to-bumper in the city's winding streets. Unfortunately, The Getaway is something of a train wreck, as its ambitious nature opens it up to a lot of much-deserved criticism as a game or as a movie. Though The Getaway's combination of driving and on-foot shooting sequences is occasionally entertaining, and the production values are impressive, usually the game just isn't fun--in place of almost every gaming convention The Getaway boldly tries to defy, it offers a significantly worse alternative. Even further, the game seems rough around the edges, with obvious bugs, graphical issues, and other signs that it was shipped prematurely. This all adds up to an experience that's by all means worth witnessing, since it really is one of a kind, but simply can't be recommended on its strengths as a game.

The Getaway tries harder than most any other game to look like a movie.

It's only a matter of time before any review or any discussion of The Getaway compares it to Grand Theft Auto III (or the more recent Grand Theft Auto: Vice City). In truth, however, the similarity between these games is almost entirely superficial. Both games involve driving through realistic-looking cities, being able to carjack anyone on the road, high-speed chases with the cops and with rival gangs, and on-foot shooting sequences pitting players against a ridiculous number of opponents. However, The Getaway lacks the open-ended structure of Grand Theft Auto III, instead putting you through a linear series of more than 20 missions, each separated by cinematic cutscenes. The Getaway thus is fundamentally different from Grand Theft Auto III, though it's very similar to (but not nearly as good as) Mafia, last year's PC gaming sleeper, and the first such linear single-player crime-themed driving-and-shooting game.

The Getaway also lacks Grand Theft Auto III's dark sense of humor, instead presenting a coldly brutal tale of blackmail and revenge, filled with unsympathetic characters and no real sense of development. Featuring a hip electronic soundtrack and dialogue that is heavily laced with profanity and British slang, the game seems styled after Guy Ritchie's modern British crime films like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, but without those movies' comedic moments. The game begins when a woman is shot in the stomach and her son is kidnapped. She turns out to be the wife of former crook Mark Hammond, who rushes to the scene of the crime, only to have his wife die in his arms, making it look like he was responsible. He speeds off after the true killers but is caught, savagely beaten, and then put to work by the evil crime boss Charlie Jolson, who threatens to kill Hammond's young son if he refuses any of the suicidal missions put before him. Before long, Hammond will be back on his home turf, killing his old friends, starting gang wars with the Chinese Triads and the Jamaican Yardies, shooting up a police station, and more, all in the name of getting his son back. Actually, Hammond's tale is only half the story, as once you've reached the conclusion, you'll then get to replay the game from the perspective of a hotheaded cop named Frank Carter. Carter wants to put an end to Jolson's criminal regime single-handedly, and his story takes place simultaneously with and at times intersects with Hammond's.

This one really earns its M rating. Get ready for lots of violence and tons of swearing.

The story is a major portion of The Getaway, and the cinematic cutscenes at the beginning of each mission are lengthy and well produced, though frustratingly unskippable. This means, should you stop playing the game and come back later to the mission you left off at, you'll be forced to sit through the cutscene at the beginning of that mission all over again. It's for you to decide whether this is an oversight or a deliberate restriction to get you to pay more attention to the game's cinematic portions, but The Getaway is filled with many other such puzzling design decisions. Clearly the attempt was to do away with all the supposedly unrealistic conventions of gaming. Or, rather, the developers really wanted The Getaway to look like a movie rather than a video game, and thus eliminated all the "gamey" things you'd expect to see, including your character's life bar, an ammo readout, an onscreen map, and a compass. So, how do you tell when Hammond or Carter is about to die? That's easy enough--you'll see him limping and hear him gasping for air, unable to move at full speed. But the game's attempts to make up for some of its other omissions aren't quite as sensible.

For one thing, throughout the course of the game, the only way to tell which way you're supposed to go when driving toward a mission objective is by following your car's turn signals, which automatically illuminate when you should be headed more to the right or to the left. This seems clever at first, but then you'll realize that these turn signals will often guide you head-on into one-way traffic, even if you're used to driving on the left-hand side of the road. Furthermore, since you'll often be trying to lose the cops or some gangsters while tearing around London, it seems positively ridiculous that you'd be using your turn signals in the middle of an intense car chase. Meanwhile, the car physics in The Getaway are only vaguely realistic, to the degree that most cars can slide around a lot and be heavily damaged without much effort, but not to the degree that you actually feel as if the game provides an accurate sense of what it's like to actually drive all the various vehicles you'll come across. The collisions sometimes look decent, but the cars are locked to the ground and can't flip, and the artificial intelligence for the pedestrians and the traffic is pretty spotty. Many pedestrians seem more than willing to let you run them over, while driving against the flow of traffic rarely causes oncoming cars to act any differently than they otherwise would.