Platform	PlayStation 2
Available	Dec. 11 (UK)
Price	39.99
Genre	Action
Developer	Team Soho
Publisher	SCEE

From the latest issue of the Official US PlayStation Magazine:

"We're trying to push the language of videogames forward. We want to make games grow up a little bit. We're not trying to be controversial. We spent a lot of time designing the game in such a way that you get all your cues from the environment. We wanted to abolish what we call 'screen litter'; the health bars, energy bars, score, and stuff like that. We think our audience is adult enough to understand the action. Using our tools for artistic representation and the suspension of disbelief, we can achieve things no other media can. We have to trust our audience and stop treating them like they're all 14-year-olds. If we don't do that, things will never develop." -- Brendan McNamara, Director, The Getaway.

Strong words and admirable sentiment from the director of what is apparently the biggest European videogame ever. And quite possibly one of the most disappointing games ever. It's not that The Getaway is a particularly bad game as such, because it does quite a lot right. It has a solid storyline, enhanced by seeing it through the eyes of two interesting lead characters that aren't as black and white as their basic description of "gangster and copper" may initially suggest. It doesn't attempt to shamelessly rip off Grand Theft Auto and instead forges a style and atmosphere all its own. And the developers genuinely try to bring in fresh ideas and clever features. But this is not a review of The Getaway. This is a discussion of the basic design flaws that ultimately ruin a promising game.

And it all stems from little things. The removal of all "screen litter" sounds a novel concept on paper, but in practice it is effectively the root of all The Getaway's evils. Sound like I'm overreacting? Let's go into three of the more critical on-screen indicators removed from The Getaway and why it's worse off without them:

- Ammo: You have no ammunition counter on screen, and thus you never know how many bullets you have. Fair enough -- in real life, guns don't have handy ammunition readout screens. But if you were carrying a gun in real life, you'd certainly know how many clips of ammunition you were carrying, or the bullet capacity of your current weapon. The Getaway tells you neither. It's not even in the manual. It's made all the more galling by two facts: One, there's a reload button. What the hell are you going to do with a reload button when you don't actually know how many bullets you have? Two, characters automatically pick guns up when they walk over them. This is an extreme annoyance in a game that preaches realism and thus doesn't allow you to walk around with an arsenal fit for Rambo, because you can only carry one "big gun" (like an AK-47 or shotgun) at a time... and thus you end up repeatedly and automatically picking up guns with little to no ammo left (not that you'd know this when you pick them up, of course). And in case you're wondering whether it makes every gun battle suspenseful, not knowing how many bullets you have left in the clip... no, it doesn't. It makes it annoying.

- Health: You have no life bar. Instead, your playable character visibly takes damage. Want to know how badly you're injured? Well, if you're bleeding and limping, I'd say you're hurt pretty bad. The problem here lies in the fact that blood is your main indicator of ill health. Unfortunately, blood tends to leave dark stains on clothes... and Mark Hammond, the character you start off with, is wearing a dark grey suit. It's not easy to spy just how badly you are bleeding with that dark/dark combination. You also don't actually know just how much damage you can take -- it's certainly not realistic levels, since you can limp away from multiple shotgun blasts, but you don't ever know for sure how close to death you are.

This manifests itself as a major problem because of the system for healing. Curiously for a game that promotes realism, your injuries and open gunshot wounds disappear merely by finding a quiet place to lean on the wall and catch your breath. When you're carrying a limp in a game with already fiddly controls, finding a nice patch of wall to lean on (you lean automatically when next to a wall, apparently) is remarkably hard. Actually leaning to heal is time-consuming, too.

The net effect of all this is that any firefight you get in to will be an extremely disjointed affair. Once you take a hit or two (and you will -- fiddly controls and a camera that doesn't swing into any lock-on with any haste will see to that) you'll limp outside to lean on a wall and heal, because erring on the side of caution is best when you don't know how far from death you are. Given that enemies don't tend to rush out after you, you're pretty safe healing outside. And then you rush back in to fight again. Repeat ad nauseam.

- Navigation: There's no magic arrow pointing you in the right direction. There's no mini-map. There's no map in the Pause screen. All you have to rely on are your turn signals lighting up to tell you whether to go left or right. This is where everything really falls apart. For a start, the turn signals don't exactly work very well. When it signals left, you don't know whether it means take a left turn or just switch to the left LANE (as bizarre as it may seem, it has signalled for me to turn and then abruptly stopped after I've switched lanes but before I've actually made any turn on many occasions). Missing your turn, therefore, isn't exactly a rare occurrence.

But the worst part is you can never really take advantage of the vast, free form city you're presented with to find your way to the target. You're always following the precise directions set out by the turn signals. If you're chasing someone, you can't fall back and take a shortcut. You can't work out alternate routes to your destination because you have no in-game map, only a printed one -- and that's useless because you don't know where you are. And even if you did know where you were (say, next to a London landmark), you don't know where you're going. Ultimately, you could build up a sort of awareness to it all by just driving around and learning the layout... but again, The Getaway doesn't give you a chance to do that. You're locked into missions the whole time, and you only unlock Free Roam after you finish the game. Which is a bit useless, really.

And it completely ruins what should be one of the best parts of the game. There's little thrill in any of the driving segments because in a sense it feels very much "on-rails". Which, as I noted earlier, does not in any way take advantage of the vast, open and almost totally realistic London setting. You could possibly take advantage of it if you were a native of London, familiar with the ins and outs of Britain's capital, but I imagine Team Soho has loftier sales targets than just Londoners.

Ultimately, all games are flawed in one way or another. I think that Vice City has an awful targeting system, that Super Mario Sunshine's camera is worse than Super Mario 64's, and that Zelda: Kaze no Takuto has an unspeakably poor overworld. Yet those are my three favourite games from 2002 because the rest of the game more than makes up for it. You adjust to GTA's targeting system, you pay more attention to shifting Mario's camera around, and I'm willing to put up with minutes of my life being frittered away as Link snails his way across the ocean because I know my destination will likely be brilliantly designed and a joy to play through.

The real problem here is that you can't overlook The Getaway's minor transgressions -- like the awful, fiddly control, or the humdrum on-foot missions -- because the game is so fundamentally flawed that you can't enjoy the better touches. I like the realistic traffic flow. I like pedestrians who run like hell at a mere glimpse of my firearm in my hand. I like the story. But I can't enjoy them when the central tenets of the game -- which effectively boils down to driving and shooting -- are broken.

A real pity. Team Soho are already underway with a sequel, and though I hope they get it right the second time around, the failings here are in design, not in execution. Those require more than a rapid-fire sequel to fix.

- Ravi Hiranand
EMail Ravi