The Getaway

Turn indicators as a navigation system. That single decision tells you what Team Soho was after in 2002: a crime film you happened to be holding the controller for, with nothing on screen to remind you otherwise. No map, no mission marker, no ammo counter. Your car blinks left or right at junctions to tell you where to go, and when you take a bullet the damage shows on Mark Hammond's shirt rather than on a bar. Lean against a wall for a while and he recovers. It was a purist's idea, and it cost the game as often as it paid off.

The London underneath all this remains the most impressive thing here. Roughly forty square kilometres of the centre were modelled from photographs, with real street layouts, real signage, real one-way systems that will strand you in Soho going the wrong direction while a car full of Bethnal Green men shoots at your rear windscreen. Driving it is heavy and slow compared to the Rockstar template everyone measured it against, and that is deliberate; the cars have weight and the streets are cramped. Anyone who has actually driven through the West End will recognise the frustration as accurate.

On foot the seams show. Shooting is built around a lock-on and a lot of scripted corridors, cover is handled by pressing yourself to walls at fixed angles, and the enemy AI does little more than hold position and fire. Several missions want you to follow a precise route through a warehouse or a hospital, and the absence of any on-screen guidance turns trial and error into the actual gameplay loop. You will replay chunks of it. The checkpointing is not generous.

The story carries more than it probably should. Hammond is a retired villain whose wife is shot and whose son is taken, and the second half hands you Detective Constable Frank Carter working the same events from the police side. The cast is full of British character actors doing a Guy Ritchie register, heavy on the swearing, and the cutscenes were storyboarded and directed with an ambition that almost nothing else on the console was attempting at the time. It is pastiche, but committed pastiche.

What survives is the atmosphere: grey light, wet tarmac, a city rendered with enough fidelity that you navigate by landmark rather than instinct. The mechanics around it were a dead end, and Sony's own sequel did not fix them. Still, no other game has bothered to build this London, and that absence keeps pulling people back to a shooter that was never very good at shooting.