You finished Vice City three months ago. You’re bored. You’ve been waiting for something to fill the void in your hopeless little existence. You mindlessly turn on the t.v. every half hour hoping there will be something worth watching, something to take your mind off the rent, the weather, impending legal actions… oh, wait. That’s me. Maybe you can relate, though. What I’m building up to here, of course, is a game which, if you have your finger on any kind of pulse at all, you know is supposed to take up the slack until the next installment of GTA arrives (supposedly sometime in 2004). The Getaway (PS2, Team Soho, about 50 bucks everywhere) has, according to hype, taken gaming to the next level. While this claim is made by many, I am here to say that, in this case, the propaganda machine is not too far off the mark.
First off, the team at, uh, Team Soho, has gone way out of their way to make sure that the environments in this game are off-the-hook realistic. How realistic? How ’bout, they went around twenty square miles of London and took digital pictures of every square inch? According to my roommate who’s actually been there, the re-creation is flawless. He went so far as to take me on a tour of all the pubs he visited. And all those historical-type-places whose names I can’t recall? Splendid. Truly really cool. Makes me feel like I’m playing a video game with really realistic digital photographs of London.
As far as gameplay – First, the good stuff. The third-person running-around-and-killing-people stuff is awesome. You can jump out from behind walls and kill. You can shoot around walls and kill. You can can dive from behind a crate, roll behind a forklift, creep up behind a bad guy and crack his neck like celery. So that’s nice. The driving sections are pretty damn solid, also. The car handling is pretty true to life, and, unlike GTA, there are many actual real-life cars to choose from. Toyota, Lexus, Jaguar, etc. have all licensed their cars to be used, though. Another great thing, and fairly innovative in my professional opinion, (yeah, professional. No, I’m not going to tell you how) is the fact that they have done away with all extraneous screen clutter. What does that mean? That means there is no “health meter”. No “radar”. No “timeclock”. No “bullshit”. What’s so great about that? The good folks at Team Soho have spent so much time in creating this world (much like GTA, there are many fine voice actors, lots of motion-capture, great music) that they don’t want anything to get in the way of the cinematic experience. And maybe more than 99% of the games out there, The Getaway is truly movie-like. How, then, can you tell what the hell is going on without any gauges or meters, you may be asking? Simple. If you need to head right or left, your turn signals will blink. If you get shot full of holes, you will stagger around like a catfish until you lean against the nearest wall and magically heal your wounds. So there’s that. Speaking of things that stink, let’s move on to what could be better about The Getaway.
I like to think of myself as a guy who can walk up and down stairs without looking goofy. Unfortunately, in the role of Marc Hammond, (our hero) this is not possible. I have never seen anything so pathetically silly in my life. Honestly. They should have put little pixie wings on him and made him sing ‘tiptoe through the tulips’. Thankfully, this travesty only makes itself apparent on stairs. Everywhere else he looks great, moves great, acts great. One other unfortunate thing is the cinematic interludes. While they are entertaining the first time through, they quickly grow old. It appears that Team Soho put so much time into their great story, that they have no intentions of letting you skip through any parts of it. Ever. And they are long. Real long. And by the tenth time through a level, you want to eat a handful of pills. The only other bummer that I can think of is that this game is pretty darn short. I finished it in four days of intermittent play. And there’s not much else exciting to do around London if you’re not doing the missions. Which makes the “reward” you get for finishing the game kind of worthless.
Overall, The Getaway is a great and very playable game. It is most everything that the hype promises, and well worth the price. So cut down on the sherm for a few days, dude, and get yourself a copy. You can pay the rent some other time.
