"The Italian Job is a game for a dead system based on a campy movie that hardly anyone ever saw."

Platform: Playstation

Genre: Racing

Publisher: Rockstar

Developer: SCi

ESRB: T (Teen)

Released: Q2 2002

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The Italian Job

The Italian Job is a game for a dead system based on a campy movie that hardly anyone ever saw. While many of the late-in-the-system’s-life releases for the PSX take advantage of full knowledge of the system’s graphical capabilities and exhibit some sharp graphics, The Italian Job is not one of these. It actually features graphics that would not have impressed had it been a launch title. Add to these facts a clunky interface that forces the player to flip back and forth through menus just to save a game, and you are left with a game that doesn’t make much of a first impression.

Luckily, The Italian Job has enough going for it that, if one is able to look past its considerable shortcomings, the game ends up being well worth the price of admission (especially considering the title is available new for only $10 (US)).

The Italian Job is a mission-based driving game, like SpyHunter, or more closely Driver and Driver 2. Most of the missions have the player simply racing from point A to point B. Sometimes avoiding getting nicked by the bobbies is the focus while other levels are simply beat-the-clock type endeavors. Most fun for me were the missions that involved using your vehicle to smash another vehicle and those that involved keeping a close tail on a car.

The main game features sixteen missions. All of the missions are introduced by the Michael Caine character from the film. It is in these intros that the game first starts to separate itself from the numerous Driver clones out there. The intros have that slightly off-kilter, British humor that I have always appreciated (at least since discovering Monty Python and Benny Hill on PBS when I was eight years old). This humorous tone is carried on during the actual game and really helps make The Italian Job a blast to play.

And, though the graphics are admittedly bad, The Italian Job does do a nice job giving the player a decent-sized slab of London (and two other locations) to drive through. Though the streets are not teeming with life in the GTA3 sense, there are many vehicles on the road along with a handful of pedestrians. Ambient sound, however, is nearly non-existent, somewhat lessoning the overall impact of the environment.

Finally, for a bargain release, The Italian Job packs in a number of modes to play around with. And, in a break from recent trends, the modes are available from the beginning (if any hidden modes exist, I didn’t come across them). The modes are Challenge (a cross between the GT series’ License mode and Crazy Taxi’s Crazy Box mode); Free Ride (which lets you freely drive through any of the game’s areas and is handy for finding short cuts and jumps); Checkpoint mode (a beat-the-clock mode on a path marked with mandatory checkpoints); and Destructor mode (in which instead of weaving between rows of blinking orange cones, the player must run over said cones within a time limit). To add further value, The Italian Job also features a cool multi-player mode called Party Play which allows the player and up to six friends (for a total of up to seven players) to compete in any of the other modes in the game (save for Free Ride of course). This hot-seat style multi-player allows the players to choose up to ten events in which to compete. The events can come from any of the single player modes and in any combination (say 5 Checkpoints, 3 Destructor, and two Challenges, for instance). The combination of all of the single-player modes and multi-player gives The Italian Job tremendous replay value, especially for a bargain game.

All of these modes are made more fun by the fact that the driving engine is very good, on par with the best PSX racers (with some obvious exceptions ***GT & GT2***). The controls and physics are straight out of the arcade and tend toward the slip-and-slide side of the spectrum, but they are consistent and fun. The game does lack the sense of speed of the better racers, but that flaw doesn’t hurt mission-based racers quite like it does traditional racers.

If The Italian Job was a full-price PSX game, it would still be worth buying for those sad folks for whom the PSX is their only gaming system. At ten bucks, it is worth buying for any PSX or PS2 owner that can overlook the weak graphics and appreciate the game’s sense of humor and tight, straight-forward game play.

- Tolen Dante

(June 9, 2002)