November 20, 2002 - In being one of Sony's most ambitious and awaited games of the year, The Getaway is in a very precarious position. It's one of the few to have made the transition from SCEE's earliest game lineups to the US, and having slipped from fall 2002 to January 2003 Team Soho has enjoyed immense amounts of money and time to make this game right.
I had high hopes for it when I first saw the game earlier this year, and even now it takes a while to sit back and count up all the frankly amazing things that Team Soho has created here. There is the jaw-dropping virtual city, dwarfing Driver or the Grand Theft Auto games with its size and level of detail. There is the compelling story, a straightforward revenge tale lifted up by a sympathetic hero and a genuinely hateful villain. There is the perfectly natural and laudably frequent use of the word "f---" which could have been handled in a terribly overdone fashion. And there is the pure joy of ripping off a Lexus SC430 and cruising past the verdant scenery of Hyde Park.
Arrayed against all these fine points are imprecise controls, unpredictable camera direction, repetitive mission design, cast-iron level scripting, and some kind of malevolent god standing on high and commanding "thou shalt not implement a graphical user interface." At present, I'm not particularly pleased with this commandment. It's on that account that I have to constantly stare at my turn signals when driving, instead of the lovely city around me.
Welcome Back
Before this devolves from coherent preview into a laundry list, it couldn't hurt to provide some background information for those new to the game. The Getaway is a blend of 3D action (like a slowed-down Max Payne) and urban car-chasing (a la Driver). It is set in an accurate re-creation of the city of London, from east to west and including both sides of the Thames.
Our hero is Mark Hammond, a former bank robber gone straight after a stretch in prison. Two months out of the slam, his stable life as a nightclub manager is torn to pieces -- his wife is murdered, and his son is held hostage. Behind it all is Charlie Jolson, once boss of the London underworld, who has a grand scheme to take over the city's now-fragmented rackets. With Mark as his disposable cat's paw, he's going to burn down every rival gang in town and take over as ruler of the ashes.
The story plays out through a series of cinematics, which advance the plot in between the car chases and shootouts. Though younger fans of games and film may come in suspecting something along the lines of Snatch or Guy Ritchie's other efforts, that's not quite the tone The Getaway's creators are going for. Instead, it hearkens back to older films -- Get Carter, more than anything else, and other classics of the deadpan British crime genre. The story is pitched straight and level, with no humor except a few moments of the blackest sort, while the dialogue is both solidly authentic and dead raw.
At The Movies
At present, the game's cinematic presentation is first-rate. The plot is simple enough, and you can tell it was conceived primarily as a means of stringing several disparate mission designs together, but the characters and the dialogue give it life. Upon reflection, I can't necessarily judge the authenticity of the dialogue, since I've never spent any substantial time in the company of cutthroat East End thugs, but I can say that it sounds pretty cool to my untrained American ears, flowing naturally despite a very un-PlayStation-like level of profanity and vulgarity. It's possible that there are more instances of the f-word in The Getaway than in every videogame ever made put together. The lip-synching, furthermore, is nearly perfect, down to that funny way people suck their lower lip under their front teeth before saying...well, you know.
As detailed in our previews around E3 time, the cinemas employ motion-capture for all the physical acting, allowing the actors in a scene to be captured at the same time. The quality of the cinemas has improved substantially since E3 -- the graphics are high-res now, and the collision detection is miles better -- so it's easier to see what the motion-capture techniques have done to make the game look better. The cinemas in something like Metal Gear probably still look more impressive, with more precise and fluid animation, but if you watch that game carefully, you don't see a lot of close physical interaction between characters. Each shot tends to isolate one character at a time. The Getaway puts its characters in close proximity, and if you pay close attention, it's possible to pick out the nuances of body English that comes through as a consequence. The opening cinema, with four characters in a crowded car, is an impressive showpiece for the technique upon close examination.
What's as impressive as the quality of the animation, both in the cinematic sequences and the game itself, is the tone it helps carry. Like Get Carter, this is a violent game, but the violence is not flashy, graphic, or exciting. It's ugly, harsh, and oddly low-key -- the dull thud of a pistol-whip stands in stark contrast to the cartoon carnage of so many other games.
Out On The Town
Eventually, however, it's time to stop watching and start driving. The Getaway is, if nothing else, a hell of a tourism simulator. Available from the start of the game is a "free roaming" mode, where it drops you in a nice little Lotus-alike roadster with the freedom to wander around town. Seeing the sights is a kick, and the option is always available to swipe another car or get in a mix-up with the police, if gawking at the Tower of London doesn't prove exciting enough.
It's hard to overstate how good this virtual city looks. Turn in any direction from anywhere on the street and it's possible to see some impressive new bit of detail, whether it's an obscure licensed storefront, a building site surrounded by containers and tower cranes, that massive IMAX theater in the traffic circle north of the Thames, or a drop-dead gorgeous Bentley driving your way. The amount of texture detail is amazing, considering what we've grown used to on PS2. Though there's a little bit of draw-in and occasional mip-mapping errors, the illusion of realism holds up surprisingly well, thanks to substantial variation in the population of the streets. Unlike the E3 demo, which tended to have a lot of cloned cars filling particular areas of the streets, the current version has more than enough different people and vehicles on the street.
The cars themselves are very well-modeled in all respects. A decent level of texture and model detail is aided by realistic environment mapping and window transparency, so the cars reflect the environment around them appropriately. What's much more fun for a driving buff, however, is all the different handling styles available. The game starts off with something nice and vanilla, an Alfa Romeo 156, and tosses Mark in a Range Rover for the second mission -- in other words, it's easy to get a little disheartened by the rides in the early going. A good eye, however, reveals some killer rides for the taking.
The Getaway lets you swipe anything on the road, just like GTA. See that Lexus SC430? Grab it. See that TVR Tuscan? Grab it. See that '70s-vintage Jaguar? Grab it. See that Bentley? It's all yours. The Citroen Saxo? Don't know why, but whatever floats your boat. The Nissan Skyline GT-R? Yep, you can get those in England, and there are plenty in this game to steal. Be careful, though -- those tend to be the favored rides of AK-packing Triad enforcers.
The more powerful cars in this game are a kick to drive. The differences in power and drivetrain type make a measurable difference in handling, so the Skyline is good for plenty of grip, while something like the TVRs can slide all over the map. However, it's not necessarily a good idea to grab the fastest thing in sight -- remember The Italian Job, after all. Something slower and more nimble can be better suited to avoiding the cops and navigating through the crowded streets. Like any old-world city, London has some ridiculously narrow roads.
Seeking Direction
The Getaway isn't just a pleasant Sunday drive, though. The in-game driving sequences, despite the inherent fun of the handling, tend to wear thin after a while -- at least in this preview build we have. While there are a couple of sequences which require Mark to run another vehicle off the road, the majority of the street-based missions consist purely of driving from point A to point B. When the cops get involved, a good chase can be powerfully exhilarating -- it's great to find that proper groove in a fast car down a crowded street -- but farther into the game, as the driving sequences grow longer and longer, the appeal fades and frustration sets in.
In large part, this is due to the game's navigation system. As always, the no-GUI commandment applies, so all cues have to come from sources in the game world. The system they've come up with is rather ingenious at first glance -- it uses the car's turn signals. A left blinker means take the next left, a right blinker means take the next right, and blinking hazard lights mean that the goal has been reached. After the novelty wears off, however, a few difficulties begin to arise.
The directions given only point toward the next immediate move. The game does not explicitly state where to go or how to get there, so even a player with an encyclopedic knowledge of London geography is still forced to drive as if they were playing Simon-Says. There is no in-game map (to our knowledge this far), and hence no way to plan a route in advance or work out an alternate route if the police or a wrong turn block the most direct route. Why is there no map? What constraint of realism or immersion forbids that? To a degree, I can see why there's no big fat arrow pointing the way in the middle of the screen, but a map in the pause menu surely couldn't hurt -- who doesn't keep a map in the glove box of their car?
There's one more real kicker as far as the turn-signal issue. The Getaway has a complex damage model to represent both cosmetic and internal damage to the cars. Body panels scrape, crumple, and detach all over the car; windows shatter and fall out; steam and smoke rise from damaged radiators and engines; tires flatten and bare rims kick up sparks. The effect of damage on performance is effectively conveyed, too, so frame damage or flat tires causes a car to pull to one side, and engine damage progressively develops after driving too long on a broken radiator. Eventually, the engine will explode and cook Mark, so smoke is a sign that you need to swipe a new car.
Back to turn-signals, though. A bad rear-end collision, the kind that happens very frequently when the cops are on Mark's tail, will break the brake lights and turn signals. Busted turn signals mean no navigational assistance whatsoever until you steal a new car.
Take This Shooter
Driving is only one-half of The Getaway, as we learned earlier this year. Points A and B are usually the location of a hellacious firefight, which must be survived through stealth, quick thinking, and the judicious application of human shields. Mark is ostensibly a nice guy, but that doesn't stop the body count from mounting well up into the triple digits.
The closest cousin to The Getaway's action sequences, though it may sound like an odd comparison, is probably Winback, the Koei third-person shooting game. Both have heavily scripted action sequences, and both also rely heavily on a jump-out maneuver. The best way to sneak up on enemies in The Getaway is to press up against a wall, sidle over to a corner (which pushes the camera around so it's possible to see what's around the corner), and then hop out to shoot at whatever bad guys lie beyond. Jumping out to shoot and jumping back into cover is easy enough, so getting the drop on the enemies this way is by far the best tactic in the game.
However, it's not always so simple as that. Your word for the day is "script." This half of The Getaway operates according to an ironclad script, which dictates enemy placement, enemy behavior, trap locations, and thus the actions necessary to get the player safely from one end of the level to the other. The script is always the same every trip through each shootout (as well as the one or two stealth-based missions), and so success is not necessarily based on quick reflexes or careful surveying of the situation so much as it is a matter of learning the script. Trial and error is the method, as it was in Max Payne to a degree. The camera is a significant issue here, because it rotates relatively slowly as Mark moves around. It's definitely possible to be shot by an enemy before the camera swings around to show where they are.
The automatic aiming system is a frequent source of trouble at present, because it is an absolute requirement in firefights. There is no option to simply hit the square button and fire at the nearest available target, a la GTA -- the player must zero in on a target with the R1 auto-aim before firing. R2 enables a free-look mode where it's possible to fire at any available target, but that isn't a viable option for a shootout due to the amount of time required to tick the analog stick over to the desired aiming point.
This would be an only minor limitation if the auto-aim always worked as desired. However, it still has some problems as yet. First, it interjects an extra button input between seeing a target and opening fire. The AI bad guys are not so constrained, which means that enemies frequently get a shot off while Mark is taking aim. He usually gets the last laugh, since the bad guys like to sit back and think for a bit before popping off a second shot, but that damage mounts up through five or ten opponents. Furthermore, the auto-aim has a nasty tendency to pick the exactly wrong target in a tight moment. Given the choice between a shotgun-toting bastard five feet to the right and some club-waving bobby ten yards to the left, it seems to prefer picking the more distant target, as opposed to the vastly more dangerous one. This is an issue that I very much hope will see some tweaking before the final version is released.
To be filed in the curiosities drawer along with the lack of an in-game map is The Getaway's curious method of restoring its hero's health. Of course, there are no power-ups of any sort, since those would apparently break the realism of the game. Instead, to get health back, you maneuver Mark up against a wall -- he'll lean against it and gradually gain some health back. His level of injury is subjectively represented by limping animations and bloodstains on his suit, which disappear slowly until he's back in fighting form.
Again, I can understand the desire to create an interface devoid of unrealistic elements. But I'm not sure this feature accomplishes that goal so well. For one thing, stretches of sitting around doing nothing tend to break the rhythm of an action sequence just as much as noshing a green herb or a roast chicken would. For another, how is it necessarily so realistic? Wounded people don't get better when standing still -- they bleed out, go into shock, and die.
As far as this preview version goes, The Getaway could also use some tuning as far as the behavior of the supporting cast. A couple of missions team Mark with an AI-controlled partner, and their level of smarts leaves something to be desired. Two commandments need to be implemented to guide their behavior. In the interior shootout missions, they need to avoid danger at all costs -- they should not stand around shooting while surrounded by poisonous gas. While on the street, they need to get in the car at all costs -- they should not stand around shooting while Mark is in a car waiting to take off.
To Be Continued
With some tuning, The Getaway could be much improved. The camera and aiming control has come a long way since E3, so I hope to see it continue to get better, and the AI just needs some sharper pathfinding routines (especially that get-in-the-car commandment). I sincerely wish that there were an in-game map, if only just in the pause menu. It would improve the tourism aspect of the game immensely, in addition to adding more depth to the car chases. In that situation, the turn signals would be a supplement to navigation rather than the only guide available.
I'll keep a good thought as we work further into the game, then, because so much of it is so good -- the graphics, the story, the pure fun of driving. It has some of the sharpest presentation of any game around, too, with a perfectly clean interface, progressive-scan support, a 16:9 aspect-ratio option, and superb stereo sound (there's no Dolby Pro Logic II, but the basic surround is still excellent). Look forward to more substantial media updates on the later missions in the game over the course of the rest of the year.
-- David Smith
