PlayStation 2

The Getaway

So, what we have here is effectively GTA3, set in London, with a lot more swearing. It's a fantastic title and one every Londoner should own, believe me, it's a great way to relax after being cut up in Blackfriars by a black cab. Even if you have no idea what London looks like, you should own this game. It's Lock Stock and Snatch, mixed with GTA3 mixed with real life, a medley of grit, profanities and death. Entertaining stuff. Get 'im! Get 'im! Bloody hell, my Nan drives faster than this...

With a total development time of 3 years, The Getaway delivers on all accounts. Visually, chances are you won't find many games like this on the PS2. The level of detail that Team Soho put into virtual London is ridiculous and will surely go unrivaled for quite some time. The car detail is precise and there really isn't much to complain about there. There are a few visual hicks here and there, but nothing too staggering. Most importantly, The Getaway plays like a dream. It's a hybrid of Hitman 2, Grand Theft Auto, and Syphon Filter. The action is top-notch, and while the controls may take a little time to get used to, the auto-aim is a big plus. On a final note, the game's voice acting is as cinematic as can get. With all of that said and done, The Getaway is worth the 40 bones that most retailers are selling it for.

The Getaway is tough and nasty in both gameplay and story line. In the world of video games, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City certainly proved that crime pays - and plays. Now The Getaway has hatched a free-roaming 3D caper that's ready to steal the show.

The Getaway is another one of this games that have spent a lot of time in development and peaked a lot of people’s curiosity. The game started off in development as a Playstation game, but it made the transition to a Playstation 2 game somewhere along the line. With over 2 years in development, is The Getaway worth the wait or is it just another average title that many people will pass up?

men The Getaway är, trots allt, ett mycket bra spel. Det är otroligt snyggt och storyn är bra. Uppdragen är väl uttänkta och binds ihop väl, samtidigt som man har en hel del frihet. Den som gillar Grand Theft Auto 3 eller Vice City får inte missa det här. Men det är synd att man inte nådde ända fram. För det kommer knappast att bli någon uppföljare. Team Soho kommer inte att orka och Sony kommer inte att ha råd.

You may not know it now, but The Getaway will go down as one of the video game industry’s most ambitious games. Whether it gets noticed for its gratuitous profanity and bloody violence, photorealistic recreation of a real city, or deep fusion of film and video game, The Getaway made its mark as one of the most elaborate video game productions to date. However, raising the bar that high often makes it hard to get over it, and The Getaway, although entertaining, falls victim to its own high standards.

A few years and five million quid later, Sony Europe's internal dev crew, Team SoHo, has pushed The Getaway out of the door and onto the streets. Released just before the big Xmas rush in the UK and Europe, The Getaway now graces the US PlayStation 2 audience with all the grace and style of a rabid pit bull dressed in an Armani suit. Anyone that might have been following the game will know that it was influenced by the likes of top-quality British gangster movies such as Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and more recently Snatch.

Having been hyped half to death then sinking without a trace, The Getaway has been under a lot of fire until very recently. As such, we're pleasantly surprised that not only has it finally emerged, but that it's really quite a sound package. Nice one, geezers...

In the end, The Getaway is more likely to be remembered for its cinematic approach to storytelling than its gameplay innovations, but there's still a challenging and fun game to be had in its rather unpolished trappings. Its linearity and realism will likely turn off as many as it attracts, and the end result isn't for everyone. Players looking for a good story or a gritty-realistic action game will have a good time so long as they can look past some of its more irritating quirks, and it would be interesting to see Team Soho develop a sequel, spiritual or otherwise.

The Getaway is amazing and infuriating in roughly equal measure. Parts of it are as good as anyone has ever done in their particular vein, or indeed as good as anyone is likely to do in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, other parts of it are so astoundingly bollixed that one wonders how they made it out of the testing phase. Here is a game where you can drive around a virtual rendering of an entire real city, modeled down to authentic individual storefronts; here also is a game with an aiming system that considers some bugger 50 yards off a greater threat than a guy six feet behind you with an assault rifle.

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.

The Getaway is a foray into a European criminal world that will immediately be compared to the recent Grand Theft Auto games. However, instead of the open-ended gameplay of GTA, The Getaway aims for a more cinematic, linear narrative, split between driving and gunning sequences. This rhythm is repeated again and again through 24 missions, split between Mark Hammond's story and the story of Frank Carter, a cop out to end Jolson's reign of terror over London.