Marc Ecko's Getting Up Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

Please remove your hoodies before reading this review

'Getting Up' is not a new game relating to the Monday morning chore of going to school/work and the monotony of life (you can tell its been a long week. 'Getting Up' is all about spraying your tag around town and comes urban maestro Marc Ecko. At last a game centred around anti-social behaviour!

Graffiti comes in many forms and while I hate the 'I wuz here' tags I have great respect for some of the larger more intricate commissioned designs.

The aim in 'Getting Up' is to run round town and collect spray cans while avoiding the council's attempts to stop you. At the end of each level you get to spray a very colourful tag.

The graphics for the tags at the end are very good. However, the graphics during the game are nothing special. Your character, Trane, appears very small on the screen and although he can jump and slide, his animation is a bit naff. What is pretty unique is the background during the game. When you start, the background is just plain black. Once you start collecting cans, buildings and walls appear. It's a nice effect and no doubt took a lot of thought and programming. Mystery items, like trampolines and lifts can also be revealed along with the background.

The backgrounds don't vary too much during the game but with the enticing gameplay you will soon forget that its the umpteenth red brick wall you've sprayed.

Overall the game seems inspired by the Robocop film. Futuristic drones, a dark atmosphere and newsreader reports are common features to both.

Playing the game is more like Mario meets Tenchu than Robocop. You have to jump and slide around the town to collect all the cans. You also have to perfect the wall jump where you can keep jumping higher and higher up chimney structures. Overall there is good variety in moves and even the complicated wall jump is not too hard to perform on a D-pad.

Marc Ecko is a big name in hip-hop culture and is involved in G-Unit clothing and Avirex and the game does boast a hip-hop soundtrack. While I am a hip-hop fan, I wasn't overly impressed with the music. The sound volume is a little high and obtrusive.

There are about ten levels each with 3 difficulty settings, the game is based around the story of Trane and as you progress through you automatically play on harder settings. There are 100 cans in each level but you don't need to collect all of them to complete, just collect all the ones near the end after the big yellow cross. From each level and difficulty setting you are given a Rep % which is basically the number of cans collected. There is plenty in the game to keep you playing for a very long time. The game has infinite continues and its not about high scores, just getting your tag sprayed. To top it all off, the final tags are stored in your black book to review at any time.

Put your hoodie back on and lets get sprayin'