The Getaway comes across like a modern British film noir, with its lead characters truly personifying the anti-hero role. Players are cast as Mark Hammond, a former bank robber, thief and petty thug who’s retired from his life of crime. With a new job, a wife and a little boy, Mark’s life seems to finally be on a peaceful, law-abiding track. Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and so do crime bosses. Deciding to put Mark’s “talents” to use, a crime boss named Charlie Jolson sets a plan in motion to blackmail Mark into performing jobs by kidnapping his wife and kid. During the abduction, things go horribly wrong, leading to Mark’s wife getting shot and killed in front of their son. Arriving too late to stop the assailants, Mark runs after the criminals who’ve snatched his son to exact revenge.

In the demo, driving sequences were initially used to chase down fleeing enemies in fast, reckless races, although there are also moments where you’ll simply need to get from one place to another with a dangerous amount of speed. If you’ve ever seen any action sequences that have ranged through the streets of London, you might’ve noticed just how narrow, congested or confusing the streets can be. Well, in one of the largest photo-capturing sessions in gaming to date, Team Soho managed to capture forty square kilometers of the city and recreated it perfectly for the backdrop in The Getaway. So if you’ve ever wanted to sprint across London Bridge, drive past Big Ben or watch the Thames fly past your window without actually going to England, this is the perfect game for you.

When you do manage to reach your destination, Mark typically has to sneak his way into dangerous areas, outnumbered by at least 10 to one. Whether he slides across walls or creeps his way into danger, inevitably he’ll wind up in a firefight. To prevent fully exposing himself, he can use walls for cover, jumping out to take a clear shot at a reloading enemy. If that’s too risky, you can blindly fire around a corner or over an object. In larger battles, you’ll probably run out of ammunition, but at least you can pistol whip enemies that get too close or use them as human shields until you can pick up weapons from fallen enemies.

The character models within the game come across with a very smooth, realistic manner. It doesn’t hurt that all of the cutscenes were motion captured, which allowed the designers a lot more control over each character’s movement. The designers wanted to place the player into a movie, and thanks to the high-resolution cinematics and attention to physical detail, The Getaway comes across like a mature animated film. Character’s faces depict individual emotions such as disdain, anger and fear just as a real person would, and the lip-synching is actually perfectly done to match with the game’s audio.