The Getaway: Black Monday

Written by Charlie Sinhaseni on 2/7/2005 for PS2  

I was very forgiving when it came to the first Getaway because I was impressed with the amount of hard work that went into the title. The designers were obviously in love with their title and they spent and awful lot of time refining it in order to make it look like a Guy Ritchie film. For that they were able to create a compelling storyline that was intriguing to the gamer from start to finish. That was nice and all but the boys at Team Soho forgot that they were developing a video game and not a major motion picture. They left out all of the basic features in video games such as stuff like, you know an interface, targeting indicators, guidance, and the list goes on and on. Apparently they can’t learn from their mistakes because Black Monday is more or less a rehash of the first game with a few minor updates and minus the intriguing storyline. What you have is another unfulfilling adventure that really isn’t worth your time.

Black Monday takes place in London but features an entirely new storyline that has little to do with the original Getaway. There are some references to Charlie Jolson and Nick Collins but other than that, you’re dealing with an entirely new host of characters. It seems that the Russians were tired of screwing things up in Moscow and decided to shake stuff up in London. At the onset of your adventure you will take control of office Ben Mitchell as he does battle with a new enemy. Later on you’ll assume the role of a boxer named Eddie and Sam, a female thief who has no means of attack. This adventure casts you as three different characters that have their own reasons to hate London’s premiere crime boss. You’ll learn more about their struggles via some engine rendered cutscenes that showcase Sony’s motion capturing abilities. Keeping in line with games like the original Getaway and Rise to Honor, the game features excellent cutscenes that showcase animations that you otherwise wouldn’t see throughout the course of the game. They’re an excellent technical achievement and are helping to pave the way for more advanced motion capture techniques.

The storyline is the least of your troubles, from the outset you can tell that you’re in for a bumpy ride. If you’re one of those players who likes to jump into a game without reading the manual (or you rented it from Blockbuster) you’ll be in trouble because the game does nothing to settle you into the action. Instead, it hands you three eggs and tells you to make it an omelet. There are no indicators, no tutorials, no on-screen guides, nothing to tell you how to play the game. The developers expect you to be a pro right from the start and reinforce that attitude by giving up absolutely no guidance. It’s bad enough that the game has no indicators to speak of (such as basic things like, you know, health meters, ammo gauges) but it has no targeting cursor either. This essentially makes the manual aim useless as you have absolutely no idea what you’re aiming at. You’ll have to rely on an inconsistent auto-targeting system that simply falters when dealing with multiple enemy situations. Luckily, the AI is absolutely horrendous so your inaccuracy won’t hurt you all that much. Add in a horrible camera system that has a hard time tracking your character (after turning, you have to stop to let the camera catch up) and you have one of the most poorly designed action games made in the past three years.

And it’s not just the action sequences either, the driving sequences are far worse due to some decidedly bonehead decisions. In the original Getaway players have to navigate through London with the use of their car’s turn signals. There was no map, no destination tracker and no indication that they were going in the right direction. What made this so tough was that players often traveled to random destinations that would be hard to find on a map to begin with, now imagine going there blindly through the use of turn signals. The designers have made some effort to remedy this by allowing players to bring up a map in the pause menu, but the frustration still remains. Pausing the game to bring up the map again and again really disrupts the action and the map isn’t all that detailed to begin with. It lacks a legend and it actually took me a good five minutes to figure out which dot was me and which dot was my destination.

Other facets of the driving sequences don’t make sense either, such as the lack of a rear view mirror. Alright, so maybe you won’t have a map readily available while driving but you’ll always have access to a rear view mirror. The game doesn’t feature one and it makes the chase and escape sequences all the more difficult. We also found it odd that the game forces you to navigate through the streets from a raised chase cam instead of an in-the-vehicle camera. This makes it difficult to drive higher vehicles as you can’t really see over their high clearance. The controls are also muddy and the sensitivity levels are inconsistent. Barely tapping the analog stick will turn the vehicle slightly while add more force will cause the vehicle to turn too sharply. It’s like the vehicles operate on digital control instead of analog.It’s not that the designers didn’t try to make the game good; there’s a decent cover system in use and you can lean against walls, it’s just the manner in which they’re implemented. The designer’s decision to forgo an interface for the sake of cinematic preservation hurts the game once again. You can still magically heal by taking a breather in the middle of the action to lean up against a wall, but it’s limited now. It can only be performed a number of times before your character refuses to do it. From that point on you’ll need to find some health packs that are scattered throughout the levels in order to survive. At least they’re making progress, but it doesn’t save the game from being dull and repetitive.

Since the game takes place in London the game pretty much looks like the two-year old Getaway. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because the city is still rather impressive to look at. New features include the Tube (the subway), some more back-alley locations and a whole host of new graphics techniques that cover up the game’s rather bland textures. Especially impressive is the new lighting filter that adds a halo around light sources, almost making them blinding. It’s a surreal look that really hammered the point home in Killzone and it looks especially impressive here. The game defaults at 16:9 widescreen but can also be played in the standard 4:3 ratio that is most common amongst consumers. I actually preferred the 4:3 version of the game because I felt that the 16:9 was zoomed in too tightly in order to compensate for the lack of available vertical viewing space.

An area that really bothered me about the first game, and carries over to this sequel, is the language. It seems as if the designers were dead set on developing a game based solely upon British slang, no matter who they alienated. Even though they’re speaking English, it’s basically impossible to understand exactly what it is they’re trying to say. I had to turn on the subtitles and even then, I could only piece together little bits and pieces of the conversations. It’s the equivalent of someone making a game starring Snoop Dogg based on inner-city culture and then packaging it for a major release in New Zealand. It just doesn’t make sense. The rest of the audio is decent but the sound effects are entirely underwhelming. Gunshots are weak and don’t really have a satisfying feel to them. The music is pretty nice as the designers opted to go for some jazzy tunes that really help set the mood.

If you get tired of the main adventure you can embark on a number of other mini-games that really aren’t that well designed. Of these, the free-roaming mode is the most interesting because it gives you a chance to check out the sights without being confined to the mission structure. You can still roam around and cause havoc but it’s not as fun as the free-roaming mode found in the Grand Theft Auto games because there’s simply not much for you to do.

What makes The Getaway: Black Monday so intolerable revolves around the designer’s ability to recognize what did, and what didn’t work in the original Getaway. By failing to do so, their game has been plagued by the exact same issues that hampered its predecessor. There’s a huge difference though, it’s the year 2005 now and people expect more out of their videogames. When games like Mercenaries, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and even The Punisher are giving players more variety, Black Monday is providing them with more of the same. Rent the game for the storyline; just make sure you have a lot of patience because the gameplay will most certainly test it.