Getting Up pulls you in right away with some great cutscenes and excellent voice work. From there, a tutorial level shows you the all the gameplay techniques. There are three main areas to this, fighting, climbing, and tagging. You'll get to do a little of each in this first level.

The fighting is pretty basic, as it should be, with additional moves opening up as the story progresses. It's just not executed very well. You have a button for punches and one for kicks, and when used together, you grab. You can pick up and use items from the environment, like a piece of wood. The problem is, there are some serious control issues when in combat. Button presses often don't register, and combos like Y, Y, hold Y end up being way more difficult than they're worth.

The overriding theme of the game is to find specific locations in the city and tag them. Unfortunately, you can't just go around tagging wherever you please. Apparently the main character, Trane, knows best. He has an artist's intuition that will point out key spots to tag. This will identify your main and secondary level objectives. Once you know where to tag, part of the game is getting there. Like the title implies, you'll have to get up to some of these spots, and that involves a fair amount of climbing and jumping. The only problem here is that the game changes to a fixed perspective, and it's often hard to judge where to leap from.

Once you've made it to the location, it's time to tag. Before you leave on a specific mission, you get a chance to set up your black book. Your black book is an important part of life for a graffiti artist. It's a place to store your own artwork, as well as add pieces from other artists. It's here that you'll choose the pieces you want to use on the next mission. There are many types of tags like marker, stickers, posters, and of course spray paint. You choose the position and the size, if possible, and then lay it down. There's an added gameplay element when working with spray paint. You have to work with the left and right analog sticks to spray the entire piece. You're working against time, and you have to make sure that you keep pressure in the can and avoid drips by not lingering in one spot too long. This part was enjoyable, but became monotonous as the game moved on, due to its simplicity.

Somehow, in a game that's main objective is to paint graffiti, there's no option to create your own artwork. I'm still very impressed by the art that's contained in the game, but an option to create your own would've gone a long way. The artwork looks so good in the game, it actually clashes with the otherwise mediocre graphics in the rest of the environment. While not a technical masterpiece, the visuals still do a great job depicting the gritty, urban city.

You can see where the focus of game development was with Getting Up. It's more about telling the story in a believable environment, than it was on gameplay. That's certainly apparent with the audio. There's some fantastic music in this game, and that's coming from someone who's not really into the hip-hop genre. In addition to the music, they went all out on the voice talent. It's one of the most star-studded lists of voice actors I've ever seen for a video game, and as expected, they do a great job.

Like I said in the beginning, I was drawn into the game for the atmosphere, but once you get further into the game, it becomes harder to accept the shortcomings in the gameplay department. The clumsy combat engine and the somewhat frustrating platforming elements keep Getting Up from being nothing more than an average video game.