Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure (only called Getting Up from now on … I promise) represents a tried and true third-person, action/adventure game but in a world where no game has gone before: the gritty world of the street graffiti artist. And while few will consider it an "A" title, it is adequately playable and does a good job of introducing the culture of the graf artist to the uninitiated and giving those already familiar with the world of graffiti a game to call their own.
Getting Up takes place in the fictitious and oppressive city of New Radius. (Any similarities to any other large city with the word "New" in its name is, I'm sure, purely intentional.) You start playing as a toy (rookie graffiti artist) named Trane on the mean streets of New Radius with dreams of being an acclaimed graffiti artist. But a lot stands in your way on the way to fulfilling your dreams. Rival graffiti gangs don't like you tagging on their turf and the mayor's anti-vandalism squad known as the Civil Conduct Keepers, or CCK, are a bunch of dangerous thugs in their own right. As he starts out, Trane only wants to be an artist. As the game progresses he finds a higher calling and begins to work to bring down the mayor of New Radius and his oppressive policies. Graffiti artist as hero? It is a stretch, but this is a game for the fans of the art form.
Make no mistake. This game is not Jet Set Radio where tagging is kind of an afterthought and the skating was the focus. Getting Up rewards your tagging skills. Bigger, higher and more-dangerously placed all count to improve Trane's reputation and move him up the ranks of the graffiti ladder. He'll also develop a variety of skills from spray painting to using markers, rollers and wheat pasting. All of the major schools of graffiti art are represented. In addition Trane will meet some real-life stars of the graffiti culture as they make cameo appearances in the game.
Each mission will have Trane completing a set number of graffiti-related objectives. The actual play mechanic for laying down your tags is easily picked up and you'll add new ways to apply tags as the game progresses. But you can't just tag anywhere. Even if you want to tag certain areas that look like they'd be perfect locations, the game will not allow you to. You'll be guided in your tagging quests by your intuition. In Trane's case, his intuition shows him the way to a sweet spot for putting up his tag. Thus begins the platforming portion of the game.
Before Trane can tag that sweet spot his intuition has shown him, he first has to get up to it. That will entail climbing up all manner of architectural elements and jumping about in true platformer tradition. You can tell that most of the work went into making the graffiti part of the game good because the platforming definitely leaves a bit to be desired. Getting to spots tends to be a bit linear. Just because it looks like you should be able to jump up to a pipe or ledge and shimmy along just like you did on the pipe or ledge before it does not mean you actually can. The game apparently has other ideas about the route it wants you to take and deviations are frowned upon. The camera also does some less than desirable things during the platforming sequences. On the ground you have control of the camera. While platforming it is fixed. That would be okay if it didn't sometimes pick some rather odd angles.
Of course I mentioned those rival graffiti gangs and the dreaded CCK goon squad. When you run into these clowns the third major element of the game comes into play: combat. Here you use punches, kicks and even some impromptu weapons to put the beat down on your opposition. The combat system is not exactly deep, but it does have kick and punch combos, grapples, power moves and the ability to block attacks and reverse a grapple that your opponent may have gotten you into. The trouble is it seems like a lot of button mashing as you wonder whether the game actually got the message that it should do something. The combat controls just aren't responsive enough to make the fighting really enjoyable.
Audio is more than serviceable with respectable sound effects and some real talent in the voice acting department. (Adam West as a police chief? What a surprise!) The music soundtrack offers a good variety of hip hop artists laying down some appropriate tunes.
Graphics, on the other hand, are more mixed. The character designs are not real well detailed but they do move well. At the same time the environments of New Radius are all they should be, with the gritty urban decay of an aging city apparent everywhere.
Since this game is all about the art and the creativity of the heroic tagger, I was a little surprised that the game did not include a tool that would allow the player to express his creativity by putting in his own art work rather than always having to use the game's canned stuff. Far Cry Instinct's level editor was a feature that added immensely to the longevity of that game and it was surly harder to implement than some type of simple art editor feature that could have been incorporated here to add more to the personalization of Getting Up and the desire to replay.
While all of Getting Up's diverse elements are to varying degrees lacking, the game ultimately comes together as a moderately entertaining experience. I think that it really could have used a bit more polish before it hit store shelves, but considering how long it had already been in development and Infogrames/Atari's financial setbacks, it probably needed to get kicked out the door. And since this is the first game centering on the graf-artist culture, I suppose we can't expect too much from this initial effort. Above average, but just barely with a "B-" score.
