E3 2002: Getaway impressions

We got to sit in on a demonstration of Team Soho's The Getaway earlier today, and we also got some hands-on time with the game. It's a very ambitious game indeed, but it's also encouraging to see that most of its more complex features are already implemented. The game takes place in modern-day London, several whole districts of which have been fully modeled by the game's developer. The team has also modeled a host of real-world cars, including autos from manufacturers like Range Rover, Citroen, and Toyota, among others, with BMW still in negotiations. Since you'll be jacking these cars (and more than likely destroying them), the model by which Sony has acquired the rights to use them in the game seems all the more interesting--rather than licensing them from the manufacturers, the companies are actually treating their inclusion as a cross-promotional marketing campaign. How this will logistically affect the way the game is promoted has yet to be determined. It's also probably beside the point.

The Getaway is a GTAIII-style free-form action game, though it bears many stylistic differences. The mission structure--and your ability to deviate from it unlimitedly--is nearly identical, though the game's tone is much more dramatic and less self-consciously hard-boiled. You play as Mark Hammond, a London gangster type, who's doing all sorts of bad things under coercion from an even more hard-core gangster named Charlie Jolson. Charlie will ring you up and send you on missions, all of which you can expect to be quite unsavory. We got to play a few of the first missions during our demo time today, all of which involved driving somewhere and killing lots of people.

Driving around is one half of the game. The driving model that's currently in place, once it's undergone some fine-tuning, will behave just like you'd expect it to. You steer with the left analog stick and can either use the X and circle buttons to accelerate and brake, respectively, or just use the right stick's up and down inputs to control your speed. Regardless, you'll use R1 as a hand brake, and given the layout of London's streets and the car-chase-happy driving physics, you'll use it quite a bit. When on foot, you'll use the circle booth to break into cars, which you can even do from the passenger's side.

The on-foot mechanics are a bit deeper than GTAIII's. You draw whatever gun you're using with the square button and shoot with the circle. The X button serves a variety of purposes; when you're near a wall, it lets you back up against it, and while walking, it lets you perform a sort of evasion roll. The R1 and R2 buttons control your aiming, the former initiating a sort of autolock-aim function, the latter enabling a free aim. When you're on the street and you see someone you want to hold hostage, you accomplish this by pressing the triangle button. You'll then be able to walk around with the person in a headlock, and this will deter police officers from shooting at you. Gangsters aren't so conscientious, though; hold one hostage, and, depending on the hostage's rank, his mates may not hesitate to shoot him. It makes the "human shield" tactic viable, in any case.

The Getaway is a game that seems free of video game-style abstractions. There's no life bar onscreen, no iconic ammo clip that depletes with every shot, and no game interface. When you get shot, you get bloody and start to limp. You won't find health packs, but you'll heal over time. When you walk over someone with a weapon you don't have, you'll bend over and pick it up. It does seem to make the game pretty seamless, in regard to how you'll relate to it, though we'll have to wait to see if it indeed doesn't impede the flow of information.

The Getaway looks like it'll ship with all sorts of graphical bells and whistles in place. It already looks very realistic. Environments are huge, and high-poly particle effects are well used (exploding canisters, dripping liquids, and the like), as is real-time environment mapping on the cars. In addition, the character models animate extremely realistically, though some of their facial textures are a little sketchy.

In any event, we'll have more on The Getaway very soon. The game is slated to ship this November, so we'll likely have an update for you quite soon.