By Sam Coles:
A series that Sony has let fall by the way side is The
Getaway series, for those who don’t know or if you’re too young The Getaway
games are what would happen if you were to take Grand Theft Auto and mix with a
Guy Richie movie like Snatch. What we get is a fun although clunky open world
game set in the criminal underworld of modern day (at the time) London. I’ll be
covering the sequel Black Monday as it is the game I’m most familiar with and
the first game in the series I played.
The Getaway Black Monday swaps between multiple
protagonists, but the main focus is on an armed response police officer named
Mitchel. Mitchel is a dry and grumpy person, but we figure out why, during one
of his assignments he was chasing down a suspect who turned out to be a kid, he
tells him to drop the gun but the suspect resists and he ends up shooting him
in the back when he flees. The story is very good with some dark moments, but
also moments where the cast has a bit of fun with some humorous moments and the
great voice acting helps too.
The main meat of the game is a linear story where you drive around
the streets of London and getting into firefights with some tailing missions
the worst aspect of any open world game. The driving can take a while to get to
grips, plus it doesn’t help with the traffic density, you will crash a lot in
this game and it feels like your car is made of rubber when it bounces off the
walls. What is unique about this game is that there is no HUD, so when you’re
driving around you have no mini-map, the game utilises the car’s indicators to
tell you when to turn and when the indicator blinks faster the closer you are
to your objective. This was used to give the game a cinematic flare which goes
for the shoot outs, but this is rather annoying when you get into the gun
fights because you’re unsure of how much ammo you have, let’s talk about more
about the shooting.
The shooting unfortunately is not very good, it’s stiff and
clunky with an auto aiming feature that seems to do whatever it wants coupled with
a free aim system that is laughable. This is one of the first set of games with
a regenerating health system as I do believe this game came out the same year
as Call of Duty 2 which was notorious and controversial with that system. How
it works is that when you’re injured you’ll see blood spots on your character how
you recover health is by leaning on a wall. Again this is done via visual
feedback in gameplay rather than a traditional HUD, but it is rather laughable
to see you character lean on a wall do some heavy breathing and hey presto he
is back to normal.
Visually the game looks really good for a PS2 game, bear in
mind that this game was released in the later stages of the console’s life
cycle so people knew what they were doing with console at this point. Character
models have a surprising amount of detail and look good (for the time) even the
facial expressions look quite good. The game had access to licenced cars so
expect to Renaults, Fords and Vauxhalls cruising the streets, these cars look
fantastic for the hardware too. The only issue I had was that the frame rate
had a habit of tanking in sections where things got busy, this was apparent
during fire fights and car chases with the high traffic density, where it would
dip to unplayable levels.
The Getaway Black Monday was a good game for its time but
unfortunately has aged as well as a week old pot of hummus left out on the side.
It’s not expensive you can pick it up for a pound, just be warned it is very
clunky, let’s hope Sony revives the series at some point.
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