It's not unusual for older properties to get licensed games, but it's still strange that the 1969 British heist comedy The Italian Job got a PS1 game in 2001. We'll forever remember the review that joked about "What's next, Oliver Stone's The Hand?" We assume this was meant to build hype for the remake, which came out 2 years later (with its own licensed game), but if that was the intention, you sure weren't going to get it playing this.
The Italian Job is mostly a movie about one big stunt, which is the Beetles driving through Turin in the climax. To the game's credit, it adapts this one sequence as good as it could. For the rest of the game, any moment that any character drives from one place to another or possibly could have driven from one place to another has been squeezed out to create a 2-hoursish campaign of levels based around 2 open maps (and a couple special ones for the Alps). Most of that time will come from the loading screens, which are around 30 seconds to enter a level, 5 seconds to retry a level, and 15 seconds for exiting a level.
It does not take long to realize that The Italian Job is a bad game. This likely happens the moment you set eyes upon it. Outside of the player's vehicle, everything in the game is a mess of polygons, no matter how close you get to them. The draw-in is horrible, and the framerate dips at times. This is a problem for a game that constantly requires fast, precise driving. Good luck with the vehicles that all feel floaty and bad. This makes sense for the Beetles, not for like a normal car or a Jeep or a bus. If you hit anything bad, your car will rotate 270 degrees, and building up momentum for reversing is a gamble. It might be better to just restart now.
The game is clearly meant to be Rockstar's answer to at-the-time rival car crime series Driver, but Driver 2 looked better, had actual damage models for the cars, and let you get out of your car, and that came out a year earlier! Oh, it also had in-game maps--Italian Job doesn't. There's no minimap and no full map, instead you're meant to stare at 3D renders of the cities from a weird angle if you want to learn all the secrets and shortcuts. Someone clearly realized this would create a problem for mission direction, so you have the near-omnipresent Italian Job Arrow to constantly point you to your objective. Funny enough, the remake's game also has a lot in common with Crazy Taxi.
Mission structure is mostly the same throughout the game: go from Point A to Point B in a time limit without crashing your car nor having the cops on your tail. We were confused about how to do the latter since neither the game nor the manual explains how to lose the police, so the best strategy we came up with was just driving in circles until we lost them. The AI isn't great, and the cop spawns in some levels are actually set, frustratingly enough. A great deal of time can be lost just based on whether you turn left or right.
Other mission types include follow and ram into a car, follow a car (this is how the climax is done), get from Point A to Point B in a time limit but damage will kill you faster, and follow a car but stay like right behind it for a couple seconds. As you play through them, the game's constant playing of the movie's theme slowly worms its way into your brain, and voice clips play of people doing very poor impressions of Michael Caine and Benny Hill.
If you're a big, big, big, BIG fan of the movie, then it might be kinda funny and the getaway level is legitimately Worth It. Most people will rightly find this too repetitive and poorly made to play for more than a couple minutes.
