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PS2 | Action | The Getaway: Black Monday

Boxart for The Getaway: Black Monday
The Getaway: Black Monday 45 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 3.0
  • SOUND: 4.5
  • CONTROL: 3.0
  • FUN FACTOR 3.0
  • AVG USER SCORE 4.5
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 2.6

Review: The Getaway: Black Monday

Review by The Man in Black | 01/11/2005 | 15:08:19 PM PST

This Getaway is more like the one that got-away.

The Getaway: Black Monday, as the second in a series, tries to push its London-based crime thrills to new heights, but it doesn't push hard enough. There's an awesome concept here with 22 missions, three playable characters, powerful dialogue and voice acting, and, of course, the entire city of London as the star. Somewhere inside Black Monday is a gritty, stylish caper that every PS2 crime stopper can thoroughly enjoy. Unfortunately, you have to endure awkward gameplay to get to it.

Paint It Black

The thing that hits you in the face when you start this game is the take-no-prisoners dialogue. That's not just because the Mature-rated story takes place in England and the characters drop F-bombs at every opportunitybut there's good interplay between characters and some actual acting going on here. The jazzy music is perfect. It sets the mood and the tempo with some excellent background sounds. Of course, you know you're in trouble when the best thing about a game is its audio.

The visuals are uneven with great-looking animation during the story sequences, but uninspiring, flat-looking graphics during gameplay. Maybe this is to set some sort of European mood. The graphics take a little more beating from the hard-to-control game cam that sometimes betrays you during your firefights. You play the action sequences from a third-person view, but the cam does a less than stellar job of trying to keep up with your movements. Your best bet is to continually aim your weapon or center the camera and keep it planted at your character's back, especially inside buildings where it tends to bang around the walls. Continually trying to properly center the cam, however, frequently places you in harm's way. Until you put some serious time into the game, you'll be blown away more often than you like from unseen foes off-screen.

Bloody 'ell

Even so, the controls do their best to keep you alive despite the gameplay camera. You can steal...er, commandeer any vehicle in London town and squeeze it through amazingly tight spaces at high speeds. But eventually you have to get out of the car.

That's when the controls really take a licking, although the gunfighting's really not bad. You can quickly switch targets during a fight to pull off some slick precision shooting in a crowd and make good long-range shots. Like the last Getaway you can peer around the corner of hiding places, too. However, the shameless A.I. sometimes teams up with that evil cam to place you in awkward toe-to-toe shootouts like with a handgun versus submachine at two paces. Ouch!

The Got-away

Maybe you're the patient type who doesn't mind wrestling with the controls and dying several times in order to find the proper viewing angle for gunplay. Then you might consider the multiple branching storylines a real treat, which they are. The Getaway: Black Monday is an ambitious game that tells a good copper's tale; it just doesn't play it out very well.