Posted July 02, 2015
The Getaway 3.
The Getaway was one of the first GTA style games to pop up, arriving in the same general time frame as GTA 3, and in many ways The Getaway was better than any of the Ps2 era GTA games in my opinion.
It was set in London and included many real life areas and businesses and landmarks, featured a great story, fantastic voice acting, beautiful graphics (for the genre and time), a snazzy cinematic jazz soundtrack and the ability to use your indicators when driving. It also allowed you to immerse yourself by not featuring an ammo counter nor a health bar. When your character was damaged he would get covered in blood, and with ammo you had to learn to count shots and guesstimate how much each clip had. Overall it was a very cinematic (in a good way) take on the then incredibly fresh GTA style.
Its sequel The Getaway: Black Monday however was less than great. While the story was still solid (albeit leaning towards generic) it was clearly inferior to the first game. The voice acting was still solid as well, as the actors did what they could to breath life into not particularly interesting characters. The gameplay itself had been refined but fell into the "too easy" category, negating the improvements overall. Perhaps most damaging was the loss of the ability to use your vehicle's indicators. It wasn't a total waste of disc space, it just wasn't as good as the first game and it had the misfortune of coming out at around the same time as GTA: Vice City.
There was a tech demo at E3 of The Getaway 3 around the time the Ps3 was launched, showing graphical improvements, that was the last real appearance of the series, lost to development hell.
In the age where "cinematic' games have become common, and all systems are powerful enough to handle a large open world, now would be a perfect time to bring this series back. If the mediocre at best True Crime series can be reborn as Sleeping Dogs then surely there is room for The Getaway to make a comeback, at least a gamer can dream.
The Getaway was one of the first GTA style games to pop up, arriving in the same general time frame as GTA 3, and in many ways The Getaway was better than any of the Ps2 era GTA games in my opinion.
It was set in London and included many real life areas and businesses and landmarks, featured a great story, fantastic voice acting, beautiful graphics (for the genre and time), a snazzy cinematic jazz soundtrack and the ability to use your indicators when driving. It also allowed you to immerse yourself by not featuring an ammo counter nor a health bar. When your character was damaged he would get covered in blood, and with ammo you had to learn to count shots and guesstimate how much each clip had. Overall it was a very cinematic (in a good way) take on the then incredibly fresh GTA style.
Its sequel The Getaway: Black Monday however was less than great. While the story was still solid (albeit leaning towards generic) it was clearly inferior to the first game. The voice acting was still solid as well, as the actors did what they could to breath life into not particularly interesting characters. The gameplay itself had been refined but fell into the "too easy" category, negating the improvements overall. Perhaps most damaging was the loss of the ability to use your vehicle's indicators. It wasn't a total waste of disc space, it just wasn't as good as the first game and it had the misfortune of coming out at around the same time as GTA: Vice City.
There was a tech demo at E3 of The Getaway 3 around the time the Ps3 was launched, showing graphical improvements, that was the last real appearance of the series, lost to development hell.
In the age where "cinematic' games have become common, and all systems are powerful enough to handle a large open world, now would be a perfect time to bring this series back. If the mediocre at best True Crime series can be reborn as Sleeping Dogs then surely there is room for The Getaway to make a comeback, at least a gamer can dream.
