A Way Out

 

 

 

 

A Way Out is a unique co-op only experience where the boastful developer claimed "Its impossible to not like this game" while introducing it at E3. Does his claim hold up?

The premise of A Way Out is a good one, and one we always kind of want. At the foundation is that you and your partner are sent to prisoner for alleged crimes Theft/murder and you've both been set up by a guy named Harvey. shortly after arriving at prison you meetup with eachother and become accomplishes.

The game is unique in a few ways, first of all its always Split-screen so you can always see what your partner is doing, second of all because only one person has to buy the game and can invite anyone to download and play the whole game with them without having to buy it first.

The split screen is one of the most entertaining things about the game as its always useful and fun to able to see what your partner is doing, from talking to people to what hes looking at in the enviorment.


While the premise and unique mechanics are interesting, unfortunately the game has some pacing issues which makes a lot of it pretty underwhelming.

For example, in the beginning has you escaping prison, but the whole prison escape is quite underwhelming and almost easy to miss. You go around trying to collect tools to unscrew the toilet in your cell to climb out into the matience tunnels, but in between doing that you have to do all these menial prison jobs and mini-games. Like showing up to work, mopping the floor,talking to inmates/guards and you do this stuff for quite a long time and its not all that exciting.

Theres plenty of cutscenes and dialogue and the game has some pretty funny writing and joke cracking, but for the most part its kind of barren of engaging mechanics, you're mostly just walking around and talking to people or puzzle solving things in the enviorment. And during the prison escape theres not really a sense of urgency or thrill because of it. Theres a lot of these 'spam X' parts of 'Press X at the same time as your partner' parts and those make up the bulk of the 'engaging' mechanics.

Like in the middle of escaping prison you crawl through some tunnels, only to show up at a prison job where you have to smuggle a wrench into your cell but spend a lot of time doing insignificant tasks and dumb mini games.

After you escape prison its a nice change of pace where you're running around through the forests and trees where you really start to get to know eachothers characters. Theres some decent character building going on here where you eventually go visit Leo's family and the hardships they endure, how both of you guys were framed by the evil Harvey villian, how Vincents wife is having a baby so you have to go to the prison to meet her...but all of these things can start to be a bit boring when theres no real oppression or mechanics to deal with, its still all the same walking around and puzzle solving things in the enviorment.

Theres a few choices you can make that either go like 'Violent path' or 'Stealthy path'  like one place where you are trying to find new clothes/a vehicle so you find a couple on a remote farm where you can tie them up or sneak past them. We tied them up and then had to search around for a bit to try to repair the truck in the barn which was more of just mindlessly searching the enviroment for the object to hit X on and other sorts of minigames.

Then you have multiple vehicle sections which control hilariously and arent that hard, but its not anything all that thrilling. Just standard chase scenes with narrow paths, theres a rowboat part which was a good change of pace and something different, but still more of the same trivial tap X stuff.

Theres another part where you play basketball with your son and thats what I mean, all the major 'gameplay' elements are just these trivial little interaction events where you do mini games to progress. Theres no real engaging main gameplay element. Its not much of an action game its like a slow, sleepy, story puzzle solver.


Things like this go on for half the game, car chases, walking around talking to people, spam X moments, quicktime events, cutscenes, dialogues, its all OK and the story is decent enough just when you've been playing for hours it can get pretty sleepy.

Like how theres yet another part where you go to a construction site and just walk around talking to workers, but atleast you track down one of the main badguys henchmen, and go on some big rooftop hunt but its not anything besides a handholding platformer. It was exciting  chasing this guy across rooftops and theres a funny interrogation scene with him ontop as well.

Then you get attacked by a hitman, which was pretty cool, but you dont do any shooting back you just engage with linear scripted press X events to eventually get rid of him. Then you go to a hospital which is a lot of more just walking around talking to people.

Also a lot of the dialogue is just strange or doesnt make sense, like you're at a hospital rushing to find your wife whos having a child, but you can talk to random pedestrians about small talk about trivial BS, or play connect four. Its funny, yeah, its just a little awkward and often theres a lot of parts which doesnt make sense if you want them to.

In between some of this the game finally asks you to choose some guns, you try them out for a minute, but then you never get to use the guns until the last hour or so of the 10+ hour campaign.

The last part of the game is the best and most engaging, you go on a plane to Mexico to track down the bad guy and you can parachute onto his island, then one of your parachutes break and the other guy has to save you.
Then when you land, it turns into a third person shooter and the shooting mechanics are actually pretty good. The guns have a good recoil mechanic and crosshair, hitmarkrs, and the game starts to be pretty fun now. Finally some action to break up the mundane walking and talking and puzzle solving.
Unfortunately, you only get to shoot a couple handfuls of bad guys for less than an hour, find the bad guy an take him out, then return back to USA for whatever reason even though you're a wanted fugitive.

Then the game reveals its plot twist, that Vincent was just a cop in disguise, only helping you in order to get his revenge on the bad guy for killing his brother.

This is the games ending and where the narrative gets a bit awkward and messy, now instead of it being a co-op game, its this weird split screen thing where its both partners against eachother. Its awkward because its like, why do we care about whos more skillful at 'defeating' the other guy? we want to do the thing that has the coolest outcome.
So theres one part where the cop player has to shoot at the prisoner player whos driving a boat, but its like, "wait man, it would be more interesting if the prisoner escaped, dont shoot at me" so the cop just sits there awkwardly doing nothing. Its strange.
Then theres a gun fight part between both players, the cop betrayer VS the escaped inmate, and again, we thought it would be more interesting if the prisoner actually escaped, so its like "Ok just let me kill you" it was just a weird way to handle the ending because its so awkward as a 2 player game.

They made it out to be as if its just some deathmatch, but we just cared about what would have the more interesting ending, so the 'deathmatching' didnt matter.

So then the game wraps up, one of you dies, the survivng one puts a letter on the widows door, end credits.

Overall the game tends to be a little underwhelming and boring due to lack of mechanics, the narrative and premise is good, but its like if the game is just a movie, it has to be a really good movie, and it was just a typical prison escape espionage revenge on the bad guy movie type thing. So then the mechanics had to be really good as well, but they kinda werent even there for the most part. If even half of the game had more shooting that would of really helped a lot. Its a unique game, and will be memorable, but even while we were playing it we said a lot "this is kinda boring" so that gives an idea of the pacing issues.. Its got decent graphics as well, but nothing jaw dropping or super state of the art graphics, maybe if the graphics were breathtakingly amazing it would of helped a bit too, but they were just kinda 2018 standard with some weirdly cartoonish characters visuals.

6/10