Being a fan one of hip-hop's original elements in graffiti, Marc Ecko brings the culture to life, via his first crack at video games with Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.
Getting Up gives gamers the opportunity to make their mark (with a fictionous tagger that goes by Trane) across a city called New Radius, which is obviously a futuristic take on New York City. Throughout the game, you control Trane, a "toy" tagger who determined to make a rep for himself as New Radius' newest graf star. But along the way, he runs into numerous obstacles...rival tagging crews, fascist-like police officers called the Civil Conduct Keepers (CCK) and subway workers keep you on your toes all the way through.
There are many different elements to the gameplay, which includes combat, but the center piece to every mission is to "get up." Moving through each mission, Trane must complete a preset list of graffiti-related objectives that must be completed before moving on.
During each mission, there are one or more primary targets that you have to get to and paint. And after completing those, you may move forward or go after the secondary surfaces that you can paint on to earn additional rep points, which help you unlock features in the game. In addition to each level's main objectives, there are also freeform challenges, where you are required to, for example, tag the side of a truck with a marker 12 times before time expires. Finding the spots to hit isn't all that hard. Before the start of each level, the camera pans over the entire area showing you the places needing paint to complete your mission, and if you can't remember them all, you can go into an intuition view mode that puts large Xs on your targets for a few seconds.
The process of for laying down your tags is easily picked up. When Trane is near a surface that's part of an objective, an outline of your tag or piece will appear. You can then change the size and/or even choose between a few different style options, before hitting the paint button to get up. While painting, you use the controller to move your arm to cover the entire area, but if you remain in one spot for too long, you'll cause drips. You also try to beat the clock at the same time. If you don't complete the tag in the required time alloted or cause drips, you won't earn the maximum amount of rep for that spot.
While most of the time you are urged to sneak around, not being seen, there is still plenty of hand-to-hand combat, if you need your fix. During combat you can use punches, kicks and even impromptu weapons such as bats, pieces of wood, paint cans and various other melee weapons. If you are quiet enough, you can sneak up behind a guard, rival writer, or other enemies and sucker punch them with a can of paint for a stealth kill. The fighting control is very simplistic, but as you advance through missions, you can earn more moves that can take away more damage with every hit. Due to enemies becoming more powerful during later missions, the combat becomes less and less easy, but is still not very difficult. It is still your best bet to use stealth as you navigation through each level to avoid confrontations with the CCK.
Combat becomes repetitive after the first few levels, and with the controls not being as responsive as most would like, combat isn't as enjoyable as it could be.
Another cool element of Getting Up's gameplay is the climbing and occasional acrobatic maneuver. While you shouldn't expect any "Matrix" style maneuvers, climbing up poles and walking alongside the edge of buildings to hit high spots does add to the game's appeal. You can climb up drain pipes, jump from a hanging position, wall jump, shimmy sideways along ledges, and basically perform the types of climbing moves from a Tomb Raider game.
Getting Up is a fun and entertaining game with a variety of elements, landscapes and different type of missions to keep you busy. Even the game's soundtrack and storyline impress, but upon completing the game, there isn't much of a reason to go back and retrace your steps, because there is not much to unlock.
If you are a fan of graf culture, then you'll probably love this. You may even want to purchase the limited editon version of the game, which includes the game, a black book with marker and the accompanying soundtrack. But, if you are looking for a game that will give you hours and hours of enjoyment for months and months to come, Getting Up may come up short.
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