There’s a little known fact that Her Royal Majesty doesn’t want you to know. She’s distracted us tone-deaf Americans with some of the finest hipster-friendly import music of the past decade (The Go! Team, Dizzee Rascal, The Streets, Bloc Party, etc.), Beckham and the films of Guy Ritchie, which every fourteen-year-old suburban boy has become obsessed with at some point in his life, guaranteed.

But dig past the amazing wit of satirical genius Christopher Morris, television gems like I’m Alan Partridge and The Office, and you will discover a horrifying secret I learned several years ago: Britons aren’t really that cool. Seriously. Neither are the Scottish. I mean just look at Chris Bews!

So now that I’ve written off the entire United Kingdom and its centuries of culture in one sweep of an ignorant broom, allow me to explain where this logic comes from. Some people, such as the developers at Team Soho, seem to think that sticking some Cockney accents on a rehashed concept will suddenly make a handicapped, broken down idea remarkably fresh. Fork over millions of dollars in ads proclaiming the presence of funny-sounding accents and “a little bit of how’s your father”, and all of a sudden the unflattering comparisons of the Getaway franchise to the Grand Theft Auto franchise should apparently be moot.

“How can you even call them the same thing!? The Getaway has cars driving on the left side of the street, and people talk like the gangsters in those non-Swept Away Guy Ritchie films!” Well, my fine hypothetical lad, fix up, look sharp, and allow me to explain all the ways you are irrevocably wrong.

The first Getaway seemed like the kind of game you’d see on other systems as the advertised “Vice City killer”, and it’s curious that an in-house Sony game should even try to get the PR muscle to proclaim it the competition for one of the defining software reasons people purchase PlayStation 2’s. Great hype was built up at E3 for the large, detailed London environments and promised action, but the end product hobbled off into the sunset of mediocre reviews and average sales.

The newly released sequel, The Getaway: Black Monday, hopes to right some of that disparaging legacy in revisionist fashion. What should the first game have been? Let’s make it so. However, this new end product still feels rushed and while a lot of good ideas are in place, they are so glitchy and hard to pull off that they might as well not be.

Before this review gets too far off the ground, allow me to clarify that the Grand Theft Auto comparison doesn’t hold across the board. To be fair and to avoid generalizations, Black Monday utilizes multiple playable characters for a broader expanse of storytelling options, and the game is divided into sharply defined missions.

Wandering around aimlessly is kept to a minimum, although you can occasionally peruse at your leisure. You should be on a leash anyway, you naughty animal! In this way, the game has more in common with True Crime: Streets of LA, which also involved the police going after criminals. In Black Monday, however, you can’t be a bad cop; it just isn’t allowed. If you wound too many innocents or accidentally kill your own men through some unforeseen circumstance, you will fail the level and have to restart for “committing too much crime!” So much for being judge, jury and executioner…

Not only is the game separated into missions, but these missions alternate between self-contained driving and action levels. The driving missions were at first extremely frustrating due to the lack of a map anywhere on the screen telling where I should drive, but then I actually read the instruction manual and figured out that my little car would flash turn signals to tell me where to go if I just paid close attention. They’re still overly boring and mainly serve as a way to get from Point A to Point B in the scheme of things.

Missions are also divided up into story arcs, so that you don’t get to play as the small-time thug/wrestler Eddie until after numerous police missions as Sgt. Mitchell. That’s not a huge deal, except that the Eddie missions are more fun from a control standpoint—for some reason he gets a lot of moves and gunplay options that the special forces cop doesn’t—and really put Getaway: Black Monday in a better light. In other words, you have to play for a good while before the game even allows itself to get better.

I have no real beef with the structure; for all my whining about the denigration of British culture through lumping together an assortment of stereotypes, I must admit the story is interesting and perhaps even enthralling. I like the characters a lot, and actually found myself empathizing with one every now and again.

My problems with Black Monday run much deeper: no matter what Team Soho does right, they bury themselves under a sizeable pile of glitches, shoddy control and overall awkward gameplay. For a long time I thought I had a bad controller because the buttons seemed to be sticking. Why else would aiming my gun and shooting it be an exercise in patience, with half the attempts not even ending up in success?

It turns out that is the game’s fault, where the whole targeting system feels like it was thrown in at the last minute without any sophistication. The issue of rushed craftsmanship continues beyond the weaponry. Hiding behind objects only works every once in a while, although all the options are given to the player in theory. Press X to duck behind an object and return fire from a safe place! Well, this normally means frantically pressing X to get within the ‘hot spot’ that allows you to hide while taking shots blind in the chest. Annoying. The other dodge maneuvers are poorly executed, and...noticing a pattern here yet?

The game brags about having a detailed, accurate London to play around in, right down to the numerous product placement ads that litter billboards on the streets. Indeed, the scope would be somewhat impressive, if Black Monday didn’t roll over and choke on the visuals.

The character models aren’t that detailed, and really the areas could use better texture work as well, but this doesn’t stop the game’s framerate from bouncing around like a kangaroo on a pogo stick. A framerate-driven pogo stick. There’s a bad tendency for the game to slow down right when the action picks up, leaving a load of dangerous enemies to be dispatched and no easy way of doing so. Just another way this game seems to try as hard as possible to screw with the player.

In an age when packing a soundtrack full of licensed music is pretty much the requirement for a game of this sort, The Getaway: Black Monday breaks the mold with a dramatic orchestral background score. No selectable radio stations, but they don’t feel necessary, anyway. The music fits the feeling of the game, which is more interactive movie than free-roaming videogame.

As I mentioned earlier, the accents seem forced (as more of a novelty than anything), but the acting is good. The sound is the best part of Black Monday, in part because unlike other departments, there are no serious flaws to counter the good work being done.

Beyond the main story mode of the game, Black Monday also features a small selection of side attractions in an effort to boost the replay value. The most obviously valuable of these is a Free Roam mode, in which players can just leisurely stroll around and enjoy the digital London without missions and time restraints ratcheting up the pressure.

Unlike Grand Theft Auto, however, there isn’t a whole lot to do while roaming except just see some sites and maybe steal an auto or two. Nothing really exciting, but I could see why developers would want the option to see all of their work on display if it took effort and time to create. The other modes involve racing and cab work, and are much like minigames found in other titles. Of course, the driving control isn’t really that great in the first place, so showing this off seems a bit weird. If you get hooked on The Getaway: Black Monday, you’ll be able to spend a healthy amount of time inside the game’s world. The key there is that you’d have to get hooked.

I didn’t come to this game with a predisposition for spite. Quite the contrary, I really wanted to like it—even when yelling at the screen and throwing my controller in disgust. Even when the graphics made me feel ill with the slowdown and jerky animations. It turns out this conflicted feeling is a very common reaction to Black Monday.

When I went to GameFAQs to get some help (please don’t hate me for this), I randomly clicked on the message board for Black Monday. Immediately I was flooded with topics labeled something like “This game is such garbage… why can’t I stop playing!?!111” Because there’s some primal fascination built in, I feel. People want to be cool members of the London underground, and they’re willing to put up with an awful lot to make that dream come true. But when you get right down to it, The Getaway: Black Monday just isn’t that fun. And why spend money and time on a game that isn’t fun?