Lots of Heart, But No Love
By Jennie Sue | AsianWeek
Developer: Sony/Team Soho
Release Date: Jan. 22, 2003
Rating: **1/2
“Oi dunno, oi gotta bad feeling about this.”
The Getaway was supposed to be the next generation in gaming. A cross-pollination of interactive gaming fused with cinema. A free-roaming, mission-based, 3-D action game three years in the making encompassing a well-scripted plot and dialogue. Made to be like one of those Guy Ritchie shoot ‘em ups, last week’s Sony/Team Soho release, unfortunately, did not live up to its ambition. Its sluggish and frustrating gameplay requires extreme concentration and focus on not only your surroundings but on your own movements and actions.
The Getaway follows the plot of two men, Mark Hammond and Frank Carter, from opposite sides of the law. The game starts with Mark, a convicted bank robber who has been trying to go straight after being released from prison. However, his wife gets murdered and his son kidnapped. As Mark tries to get his son back from London’s legendary crime boss, Charlie Jolson, he ends up entangled in the life of crime once again, with the cops hot on his tail. Frank Carter, a vigilante cop, was suspended from the Flying Squad. Both men were manipulated by Charlie, and long to clear their names and seek revenge.
You might as well pop in a “City of London” interactive tourist CD. In fact, that is The Getaway’s selling point, its impressive reproduction of London — all 70 square miles of it— right down to the alleyways and phone booths. It is not exaggerating to say that this is the most realistic rendition of a city in a video game. But the effort to develop The Getaway as a smoothly rendered game crossing the barriers of movie and game production has proved unsuccessful.
The ultra-realism is actually the source of the game’s lag and slow-moving sequences. The technical imperfection makes it difficult to pay attention to plot, particularly after three hours of replaying the same mission. You expect a fast-paced and exciting cut-scene after completing the mission, but instead, you get slow-moving dialogue speckled with heavy British slang, and maybe a gun butt over your head.
The most disappointing aspect of the game is in its delivery of gameplay. Really disturbing. When driving, it’s difficult to tell where your destination is. There is no map, and the only way to tell which direction to go is by watching the turn signals on your car (which are not always accurate). Where’s the first aid kit? In fact, where’s the health gage? The only way to tell when you are about to die, is to guesstimate the number of times you’ve been shot while you limp to your next destination. Here’s the trick with health: walk up to a wall, and when your character leans against it, he starts healing. But you don’t even find that out until you research online.
The targeting system is lacking completely, the controls used to fire are overly complicated and at times even unresponsive to certain commands, forcing the player to constantly reposition his aim, and lose perspective of the target. When aiming, the camera movement is so painfully slow, that you usually take at least one bullet before the camera even pans over to your target. If the brain actually took that long to process any physical movement, the human race would have been extinct a long time ago.
The auto camera should have its lens broken and put on manual. There’s no way to turn it off and it repositions itself every time you make a move. On occasion, the camera freaks out like it’s on speed, and within one second pans in, out, left, right, up, down and confuses the hell out of you. Usually you recover after two seconds, but by then, you may have already been shot or clubbed on the head with the butt of a handgun.
If the gameplay hasn’t scared you away yet, there may still be a few reasons to get the The Getaway (besides it being one of the most anticipated games of the season).
The dialogue is intelligent and well scripted, and the graphics are rendered almost perfectly. Another unique feature of The Getaway is its variance in plot development. The game actually adapts and responds to your movements and decisions, so what you did in the first part of the game actually affects the latter portion of the game when you are playing a different character.
If this game were as good as hoped (and we all had high hopes), it would have set the standard for the evolution of gaming and cinema. Unfortunately, Sony and Team Soho just couldn’t pull it off.
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