Summary
A thrilling experience
The Good
I've heard many referring to "Getaway" as to a cross between
Max Payne and
GTA 3. I haven't played (until now) "GTA 3", or any other GTA game, for that matter, but "Max Payne" is indeed the closest possible thing to "Getaway" I know.
The similarity starts already with the story. "Getaway" presents a trusted concept of a "lone wolf", a man who has to fight on his own against the whole world. He is falsely accused of a crime - the murder of his wife, and his son is kidnapped by gangster who can now dictate him their will. It is a simple emotional plot, that immediately allows the player to identify himself with Hammond, as easily as with Max Payne or with the marshall from
Outlaws. "Getaway" is a simple, primitive, straight-forward shooter with a strong, but also a simple and a primitive story, that drives the game forward and gives an excuse for all the killings your hero will have to perform.
Possessing great production values, "Getaway" manages to present a believable, extremely atmospheric, and quite a unique world of organized crime in London. Playing "Getaway" is mostly like watching a good, solid, hard-core action movie. The game deliberately spares no details in its faithful representation of this vicious, hostile world. Everybody are against the hero - the police, rivaling mafia gangs, and the cynical mafia boss Jolson who uses him as a tool for his dirty purposes. The criminals talk like criminals, mercilessly spitting out the four-letter word at every occasion. By the way, the voice acting in the game is superb, and the British pronounciation is (as far as I can judge) authentic and absolutely cool. The cut scenes are very cinematic, with appropriate camera angles and excellent dialogue.
The amount of detail put into this game is amazing. I couldn't believe my eyes when I first started driving around London. The city is meticulously reconstructed, every building is unique, the streets, the squares, the signs, the various types of cars, buses, and pedestrians - everything is so realistic that you start having a feeling you are really there. London of "Getaway" is a fantastic example of virtual reality. Simply getting into your car and driving around is a pleasure of its own.
The gameplay largely consists of two portions: driving and shooting. The driving basically involves going to the place where you have to complete your mission, and getting away from there. Often, rival gangs or police cars will chase you. They'll damage your car, but you'll always be able to steal another one. You also can just get out of the car and wander through the city. But mostly, you'll have to hurry to your next mission, where the main part of the gameplay, namely the shooting, begins. The shooting in "Getaway" is somewhat similar to that of "Max Payne". You also control your hero while viewing him from the third person perspective. You can either auto-aim, or aim your weapon manually at a target, and can perform moves like crouching or rolling to a side. But other moves are pretty different in both games. In "Max Payne", you largely relied on diving to the sides, and on slowing down the action by entering the famous "bullet time". "Getaway" has no bullet time, but instead allows you to perform other moves: you can break enemies' necks (a gruesome method, but it comes in very handy when you want to be silent and not to alert others... besides, if you don't kill them, they kill you, and since you'll have to kill them anyway, it's better to do it silently with solitary enemies, such as with guards who block the only way to proceed), or you can knock them out by using your gun's butt. If you are surrounded by police, an efficient way of getting out of the trouble is to grab a hostage. Those hostages can be always knocked out afterwards, and not necessarily killed. Those moves add a special flavor to the gameplay, but otherwise it is quite typical. The enemy AI is good, but not revolutionary, and I find it good so. I can't stand shooters where the enemies are smarter than you. I think the player should always have the satisfaction of being more intelligent than his/her computer opponents.
An interesting feature gives "Getaway" a unique look: the game screen contains only the game world itself, and nothing more. There is no health bars, no indications of weapons shortcuts or how much ammo you have left, and even no overview maps. There are no messages appearing on the screen (except subtitles for voices in cut-scenes), such as "got a bazooka" or "you have to find a silver key to open this door". There is no inventory and generally nothing you can do outside of the game screen (except pausing the game and accessing an options menu). There are also no shortcuts for weapons, because - quite realistically! - you can't carry more than one weapon in each hand, and if a weapon requires two hands to use it, then you'll drop your other weapon. So, you won't be running around with five kinds of guns, a crowbar, a shotgun, a rfile, a flamethrower, and a chainsaw all together. You also won't search the environment for healing potions and ammo that are usually scattered around in shooters. Sometimes, you'll find storage rooms for weapons, and there you'll be able to find a weapon, or you'll be able to pick the weapons off the enemies' bodies, of course. But don't expect looting rooms for healing items and various ammo, because there are none.
Last but not least, the dazzling graphics prove Playstation 2 is capable of handling some nice stuff. The load times are minimal, the 3D environments huge, and the cars flow smoothly through London.
I'd like to emphasize here the fact "Getaway" is
not an immoral game. The two protagonists, especially Hammond, have a good reason to do what they do in the game. It is built around a story, and not around a pack of missions for a heartless assassin. "Getaway" is not at all about mindless violence, and it is definitely not a "crime simulation" in the sense of letting YOU being a criminal and to murder for your pleasure. Of course, you can just wander around killing innocent people, but you don't have to do it. It's just a possibility the game gives you, but the choice is yours.
The Bad
However, "Getaway" is not perfect. Its biggest problem is the one many games experience today, at the age of miraculous technology progress, where gameplay and graphical possibilities seem limitless: it strives to be realistic, and because of that its inevitable unrealistic features seem bigger a nuisance than they actually are. Let me illustrate this by giving an example. You drive a virtual car in a virtual London. The city is meticulously detailed, pedestrian on the streets, billion various car models, huge environment, real buildings, etc., etc. You are told (or so is your impression) everything here is "like in real life". If you drive too fast, the police be on your tail, if you damage your car, it will not be as easy to drive, and so on. And now imagine that in the middle of all this realism you have to play an arcade game that is hardly more realistic than "Sonic the Hedgehog". The point is, all this realism is fake, or, better to say, it is just a decoration. The actual driving in the game has little to do with real life. If you drove in real life the way you do in "Getaway", you'd be dead after two minutes. In "Getaway", however, you can hijack a bus and rush through London, crushing everything on your way. Twenty police cars will try to stop you, but you'll just crush them all, and then drive into a quiet yard and... and a cut scene follows. No matter how many policemen were chasing you, they will all miraculously disappear once you automatically proceed to the next mission.
Another example is the "wall-lean healing". In order to make the game more realistic (again this word!), the developers decided to eliminate the old trusted concept of healing potions and ammo being scattered all over the virtual world. At first sight, it seems like a good idea. But when the natural question arises: how will you be able to cure yourself? - the answer is: by leaning against a wall and waiting. Now I don't think anybody can seriously believe that a gravely wounded man, all covered with blood, unable even to walk properly, will magically regain his entire health by
leaning against a wall!
Especially the interaction with the realistic environment is surprisingly scarce. One would expect you'd be given many options and many possibilities to interact with the world in such a game. But the fact is, the only objects you can interact with are cars, walls, and enemies. You can't even open a door in this game, because the action button serves an entirely different purpose: ducking behind low objects or staying close to walls. You can't jump or climb or perform any other simple actions, and you don't have an inventory.
I know, you probably think I'm nuts to complain about those things, because we all know there is absolutely no game that can be completely and entirely realistic. But since "Getaway" tries to imitate the harsh reality, and succeeds in terms of story and setting, all those minor flaws appear to be as if you looked at them with a magnifying lens, and emphasize the fact the game didn't succeed in being realistic in terms of gameplay.
The Bottom Line
Despite its flaws, "Getaway" is a great game. Perhaps those who like GTA will not welcome the fact the missions in "Getaway" follow each other linearly. Perhaps some videogame purists will oppose the "mature" content of the game, will object to the fact it shows mainly the evil side of human nature. However, with all its straight-forwardness and cruelty, "Getaway" is a very emotional game. It has a great story, setting, atmosphere, cool action-loaded gameplay, and a real look and feel of an action movie. It is a worthy successor to
Max Payne.
