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Apr 14, 2012 Welcome to the start of my Let's Play for The Getaway: Black Monday on the PlayStation 2. I've been looking forward to LP'ing this game for quite some time.
The Getaway brings the streets of London back onto our screens in Black Monday. It seems that everyone is a cockney geezer, lifted straight from the set of Lock Stock. Anyway, cultural and phonetic diversity aside, London looks good - the road mapping is very good, in that if you know the city, you can recognise where you are and where you are going. Of course, all the best short cuts aren’t there, but that’s life. They have even included the London Eye and Foster’s Gherkin to keep the purists happy.
In Black Monday you play three characters: Mitchell, the trigger happy cop, Eddie O’Conner, the ex-boxer and Sam, a thief. Each character is different and helps the game evolve somewhat.
The game plays out flexibly, with the player deciding how to complete the levels and how to progress. Its fun, but you have to look at what is going on around - and this is no San Andreas.
The biggest complaint about the first version of The Getaway was the controls and the camera. Walking around a building was a nightmare because the camera had a mind of its own. This has been totally revamped and moving your guy around on foot is now not a problem - but it lacks the feel that you get from other third person shooters, leaving you a little open to attacks as you figure out what you are doing.
The game opens well with a film style intro that isn’t too painful to watch - it looks good, and it sounds great. However, I have beef with the cutscenes. They are okay the first time round, but if you accidentally start a new game, you are stuck watching the opening again - with no escape, other than reset. It’s a small point, but one which will cause headaches in the future unless you need the occasional tea break.
VerdictThere is no denying that the map is good, and the environment is exciting. Ok, I've never seen that many Yardies rolling around Shoreditch, but that London thing is going on in this game. You can certainly do a lot worse, but if your shopping for one game, I doubt Black Monday will have enough bang for your buck. I would give it another point on the score, but there is too much else out there in one of the toughest Xmas seasons for gaming so far.
The Getaway: Black Monday is in the middle of an identity crisis. On one hand, it's a game that desperately doesn't want to be a game: it wants to be a cinematic experience. On the other hand, you can't ignore that The Getaway: Black Monday is, in fact, a game; a sloppy and uninspired game, yes, but a game nonetheless.
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The Getaway: Black Monday is the PlayStation 2 version of the Guy Ritchie film Snatch: it tries to be hip, cool, and most of all, British. Snatch succeeded in these ways, Black Monday does not. While it does try for refined cinematic storytelling, Black Monday doesn't have a strong story to back it up, nor is it told too well. With three different characters to control, the narrative is often tossed around, convoluting the plot to the point of incomprehensibility; in fact, it's even hard to say just how all three characters relate to each other in the story.
Another huge issue is that, to the untrained ear, the cockney accent of all the characters in Black Monday along with their foreign slang makes it hard to keep up with what's going on. The voice-acting is perfectly believable, yes, but it might be best if you have a good understanding of what bollocks means before going into Black Monday.
However, Black Monday's biggest fault is that it tries to expand upon the original Getaway without fixing the original problems that plagued it; and there was a long laundry list of issues with The Getaway. First among them: the camera. A lot of the action in Black Monday takes place in tight, cramped corridors, but the camera doesn't facilitate to these situations; frustration often ensues. And like its predecessor, to achieve the lofty goal of making Black Monday a cinematic experience, a lot of modern gaming conventions are thrown out the window: no visual display for your health or ammo and no in-game mini-map for driving the streets of London. Instead, you have to rely on verbal or visual clues, like how much your character is bleeding to judge what his health is at, or listening to your character for when he's low on ammo. It's a novel concept, but it doesn't make the game any more convenient, immersive, or, most importantly, fun.
The negatives aside, Black Monday is still a decent amount of fun: it's engaging enough to keep you interested for a complete play through, and the newly added and diversified gameplay elements keep the game fresh. It's just that The Getaway: Black Monday is no better and no worse than the original, and for a sequel, that's a crippling issue. Fans of The Getaway be wary before taking the $50.00 plunge.
Overall rating: 7
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