While The Getaway's visuals might not be the best on the system, Team Soho's created one of the most powerful engines seen in a Playstation 2 game.

Modelling 40 Sq. Km of a city like London is pure craziness, but these brave developers took a map and recreated each street into the game, taking photographs of the buildings, and then creating hundreds of textures to reflect the look of their beautiful city. The engine manages to show at the same time on the screen the streets in their entire length, with almost no pop-up issues and - that's even more impressive - maintaining a solid framerate throughout the game. The quality of the textures varies, from good to very very blurry, but if we consider the difficulty of handling textures on the system and the size of the environments, the compromise is acceptable.

The interiors are detailed, and even if interaction is limited to a few breakable glasses, they look very realistic. Lighting effects, that are excellent throughout the game, can become extremely dramatic, adding a lot of atmosphere to a mission.

Character models are detailed, modelled with care, and smoothly animated. Faces are the result of scans of real life actors who also provided their voice talents to the characters. Pedestrians and generic non-playable characters show a wide range of different animations that assure an impression of realism when walking in the streets of the city.

Cars look simply wonderful. The models are identical to their real counterparts, detailed even in the interiors, and they boast amazing real time reflections of the surrounding environments. The cars take damage in real time, and not only you can shoot any single window, but you'll even see a photo realistic hole appearing in the exact point you hit with your bullet. You can shoot at car tires, light indicators, rims, and anything else you can imagine.

The 60 minutes of in-game cutscenes play an important role in the game, and while they are entirely enjoyable, they are far from looking as good or as smooth as those of games like Metal Gear Solid or Silent Hill 2; the developers used a complex motion capture technique to reproduce the movements of the professional actors hired for The Getaway, but it seems that not enough work was put to fill the "holes" left by the motion captured movements. Collision problems and lifeless faces - yes, characters do move lips in synch with their voices, but the eyes are really soulless - make of The Getaway's cutscenes the only small disappointment in the overall very good graphics.

A final note: if you have a 16:9 TV (that's what I used for this review), The Getaway is the first game to offer a juicy real 16:9 screen mode.

The original soundtrack composed by Andrew Hale and performed by the London Session Orchestra is calm and relaxing, and it follows the style of European action movies more than the pompous Hollywood standards. Occasionally more emphatic tunes are used to underline a dramatic moment; nothing too original maybe, but the soundtrack blends perfectly into the fascinating atmosphere of the game.

Sound effects are rich; each car has its own specific engine noise, weapons sound just real (even If I've never heard a real Ak-47 in my life), and everything from explosions to police sirens (you'll hate them) is entirely believable.

The professional actors hired for The Getaway provided one of the finest examples of voice acting in a video game, on par with titles like Soul Reaver 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Silent Hill 2. There is lot of bad language and violence in the dialogues of The Getaway, but instead of being gratuitous, it feels as a necessity considering the mature attitude of the game.

With its 24 missions, The Getaway is a long game. Skilled players might complete the game even in 13-14 hours, but more realistically 20 or more hours are needed to complete the game the first time. Anyhow, The Getaway offers few incentives to be played a second time. Missions are narrow in scope, and are clearly designed to be completed following a precise path.

At the end of the game a Free Roam mode is unlocked, and you can finally explore the city with no time limits, but leaving aside a few extra hidden cars, this mode is little more than a (cool) virtual tour of London.