Price: £39.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes 60Hz: No DTS sound: No Two years on from the original, The Getaway: Black Monday arrives on the PS2 scene. The first was a great little game, completing missions around town (see more about it here), but it wasn't without its problems and now we have the sequel it's time to take another tour of England's capital city that's up for the bids for the 2012 Olympics (fat chance!) and see whether it's as good value as night out in London's Comedy Store, or as poor as the cost of drinks in a Soho strip joint, not that I've tried the latter, you understand. Where's the first game saw you in control of two characters, one after the other, this one gives you three. You begin as policeman Sgt Ben Mitchell (voiced by Bob Cryer, son of comedian and writer Barry Cryer), righting the criminals' wrongs in the right way by arresting them and not massacring too many innocents, then moving on to ex-boxer Eddie O'Connor (David Legeno) and then petty thief Sammi Thompson (Jane Peachey).

So, once the disc was in the PS2, I was treated to some superb opening music and stunning vistas of London. Following an overlong cut-scenes which, like some in this game, was unskippable, I was thrown in amongst my other police colleagues to storm a building and take down the bad guys. As you continue you'll discover that some sections involving running about, which does seem a bit easier to get to grips with this time round, others involve driving and the longer ones will split up into smaller sections made up of a combination of the two, with more building interiors, a trip round parts of the underground and all of Red Ken's Congestion Charge zones are now painted out for world to see (before he extends them further). On the plus side, you do get a good feeling of speed while driving, despite getting a bit of slow down from time to time, and the benefit of breaking up the long missions are that when you're killed during one, you don't have to go all the way back to the beginning. It wouldn't let me autosave, but this feature let me off saving manually as often as I should be doing. Racing around, I'm still wishing someone would do a game like this for Manchester with the same level of detail.

On the downside, it's not quite as enjoyable as a lot of the game's shortcomings haven't been addressed and it's just not as much fun as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - even with that one's problems; a lot of the time, the baddies can easily be dealt with by doing a forward roll, then targeting and blasting away as you get up; and, like last time, the game crashes on occasion. It's only done it to me once so far but this was early on so I was not particularly happy. Although you can now look to your left and right sides and behind you, using this 'rear view mirror' makes the camera turn slowly to face behind you. I want it quick and instant like on the GTA series as the Getaway's version means that by the time you get to the forward view again you've crashed into something! They may have improved on GTA's graphics, like with the original Getaway, but why not look at the things that makes that game great and implement them during the two years they've been developing this? There's unreliable camerawork while walking about and trying to aim at the baddies on occasion, there's the same old jaggies, either on the edges of things or in the middle of walls(!) The gameplay is fairly linear - get from A to B, do this mission then that one, etc, but that's not really a major problem: It's just never as free-roaming as it likes to think. Also, the AI does seem rather lacking at times. When running through to new sections, your colleagues just hang back as if they're made of cardboard, so I've got to go running in to shoot the baddies first, on my own!

This time round there's also a few mini-games: Race: 6 cars go for a race, surprisingly, and it's great fun to do so in a car-free London, but there's only two of these. Black cab: drive people about, Crazy Taxi-style but more in reality, getting them from A to B for a fiver or more (a taxi ride that costs only a fiver in London?!) Chase: get in a police car and ram both of the baddies' cars (yes, only two games of chase here too) until they can run no further in these two events Free roaming: speaks for itself. The playability and sound FX still leave a lot to be desired, although the music (optional during gameplay) does take your mind of some of the bad points. However, it does go on a bit and is a bit stop/start so hasn't been fully programmed properly. If you enjoyed the first game, take a look at this one, but if you only had a passing interest back then, then you're better off taking a look at either the GTA series or Driv3r.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2004.