The Collection Chamber: THE GREAT ESCAPE

Based on one of the most ingenious and suspenseful films of all time, this is your chance to take part in a truly epic adventure and be Steve McQueen. Heart-stopping, tension-filled stealth levels together with adrenaline-soaked combat and action sequences take you from inside a WWII bomber to Steve McQueen's world-famous bike chase.
Play as four different characters using various techniques to sneak and blast your way through enemy territory.
Engage in frantic shoot-outs in Luftwaffe airfields, heavily-fortified towns and even on top of a moving train.
Use semi-automatic pistols, bazookas, sniper rifles and a huge selection of other weapons to choose from.
Take control of a variety of vehicles, including the most famous motorbike in Hollywood history!

~ from the back of the UK box

For many of us in the British Isles, John Sturges' classic 1963 war film The Great Escape isn't just any old film, it's a Boxing Day tradition. While everyone lounges around in their third food coma, ITV (or at least one television channel) dutifully airs the unforgettable piece of cinema. So in 2003 when UK developer Pivotal Games, fresh off the success of Conflict: Desert Storm, turned this most Sunday-afternoon of war films into a PC game, it felt oddly appropriate. A British studio adapting a beloved-by-Britain war movie at a time when WWII shooters and stealth games were at their height, the IP truly made it stand out. But is it any good?

Personnally, I'd say yes with caveats. The immediate problem, of course, is that The Great Escape the film is not exactly a riot of gunfire and explosions. It's a slow-burn story about imprisonment and cleverly outwitting your captors. Despite those scenes we all have in out heads, there's very few actual action scenes. Pivotal's solution was to treat the film as a foundation rather than scripture, amping up the action while keeping the iconography intact. Steve McQueen's likeness is front and centre, complete with lifted dialogue and that famous theme tune, and the game frames itself as a series of missions "inspired by" the movie rather than strictly retelling it. This gives it licence to throw the infamous actor into situations that no production could possibly entertain in 1963, but makes far more sense with a keyboard and mouse in hand.

Press TAB to access objectives or F for the inventory. It looks weird in widescreen, but it's a good tradeoff (left).
When an item's icon is on the bottom left, new actions open up when pressing E like filing prison bars (right).

At its core, The Great Escape is a stealth game, and one that desperately wants you to behave yourself. Movement is handled with standard WASD controls, with dedicated sneak and observation systems. Holding the sneak key (default: Ctrl) slows your character to a cautious shuffle, dramatically reducing noise but also making progress feel glacial. Sneaking is not optional. Even the manual and official strategy guide makes this clear. Running will almost always alerts guards within a wide radius and without any indication of where they are or what they can see, you have to rely on observation. Holding the view key (default: Shift) while pressing a direction will have you lean that way for a better look around corners. Pressing forward this way when up against a door will let you peak through the keyhole, which becomes a necessary mechanic to save you walking out to a bunch of Nazi soldiers. In theory, this should provide the information you need to plan a clean approach. In practice, guards are wildly inconsistent on how far they can see, sometimes spotting you at ease from baffling angles or ignoring you entirely. With a feedback loop so unreliable, I found it hard to get into the sneaking rhythm that other similar games like Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell excelled at.

Combat, then, is miserable. Perhaps intentionally so. Punching is awkward and aiming firearms are stiff and inaccurate. This seems by design as the concept of the game clearly doesn't want you mowing down goons like it's Return to Castle Wolfenstein. If you're spotted, you can try swinging wildly or making a break for it, but the result is usually a quick return to a cell or a reload screen. Even if you do manage to evade capture once spotted, there isn't really anywhere you can hide and wait for them to calm down. So once you've been seen you might as we reload the last save. The game doesn't want you to play this way after all.

Peeping through keyholes lets you keep track of enemy soldiers (left).
Using the sniper rifle on a bad guy. Don't be too risky as your aim will definitely suck (right).

Level design follows a similar philosophy. On the surface, the prison camps, towns, and countryside areas appear fairly open, with multiple routes and interactive objects scattered about. Missions frequently revolve around fetch-quest busywork such as stealing documents, swapping items between characters, or retrieving tools to unlock the next stage of the escape. Costumes play a big role later on, disguising you as German soldiers and forging papers to let you wander restricted areas. Yet despite this apparent openness, there's little room for emergent gameplay. Levels often have a single correct solution. One mission has you accompany a character named Hendley on a train. Early on an inspector asks for tickets and you have to instruct him to show it using the C key. You cannot get past this section any other way. Not by moving before he comes or hiding elsewhere. This is the only way. Later on in the same mission, hiding in the train toilets may fool some Nazis, but the train conductor is another matter.

Aside from the crawling and shooting, you can also drive. Vehicles are wheeled out within a small number of levels and while they offer a counter balance to the thoughtful on-foot segments, they come with problems of their own. You control them with the WASD keys which feels a little janky. Steering the infamous motorcycle in particular is more like that Monty Python boxing sketch than an exhilarating chase. You turn on a dime and get knocked off at the slightest touch. Even navigating the areas isn't as intuitive as you might think making you resort to trial and error over actual skill. Still, it's not too far from similar games at the time, and there is a certain nostalgic charm to how it all plays out and the change in pace is very much welcome.

Choking out guards is the best way to get rid of them silently. In theory anyway (left).
Driving the motorbike is as janky as it is exhilarating. They couldn't not include it, could they (right)?

Visually, The Great Escape took some flak on release. Reviews accused it of looking a generation behind its contemporaries with blocky character models and uninspired locales. Personally, I find that to be a little too harsh. Sure, it wasn't as slick as the graphical powerhouse of Splinter Cell, but it seemed on-par with Max Payne 2 or Morrowind (though I do consider those better games). Perhaps it was the design of the character models that let the whole presentation down. McQueen especially was done dirty, looking more like something from Resident Evil or Left 4 Dead than Hollywood. Beyond that, I found nothing particularly egregious.

In the end, The Great Escape is a commendable, slightly awkward attempt to turn a famously un-gamey film into an interactive experience. Its graphics, controls and stealth system may all be inconsistent but there's a stiff-upper-lip charm running through it all, a sense that everyone involved genuinely cared about the source material. As licensed games go, it's far from a disaster - perhaps, if you have the right kind of patience, you might even call it something of a a hidden gem. Certainly so if you're a fan of the movie.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses dgVoodoo to run on modern systems. Manual and Official Strategy Guide included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 1.19 Gb. Install Size: 1.56 Gb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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