Gangs of London (PSP)

Reviewed by

Alex Navarro

on 10/03/2006

Add to my list
Print
E-mail
Share

Page 2

Driving is even worse. The car controls in the Getaway games were never all that good, but here they're made 10 times as obnoxious by the overly sensitive PSP analog stick. It's like driving on an ice rink with greasy tires, and the amount of random traffic populating the environments makes keeping your car in good working order a real chore. Fortunately, you don't spend much time driving, since the missions are so short, but when you do drive, it's a hassle. You'll also periodically encounter some weird glitches while driving, especially if you run into pedestrians. Pedestrians don't seem to want to die when you run them down. Instead, they get stuck in a deeply ugly-looking way that causes a rather loud audio glitch, and it stays that way until you veer in an opposing direction, at which point they run off, seemingly unharmed.

There is more to Gangs of London than its lame story missions, but none of these things are much better. You can't freely roam around the realistically modeled city of London in the story mode, but there is a free-ride mode, which includes a few side missions that involve such objectives as escaping the police; pulling a Speed and driving as fast as you can to prevent a bomb from exploding; beating up rioting civilians; and beating up zombies. Yeah, zombies. Anyway, amusing as these missions might sound, they all suffer from the same wonky controls and relative brevity that the story missions suffer from, so they're not any better, overall.

Another mode, titled gang battle, is basically a turn-based strategy game for limeys. You're shown a map of the city, as well as colored sections denoting which territories are owned by each gang. The primary resource is cash, and you use it to purchase new gang members and cards, which give you bonuses on each turn. On a given turn, you get three moves. With these moves, you can add more gang members to each section of territory you own, as well as send gang members into nearby rival territories to attack. The key is to try to send more of your guys than the other gang has in that area and thus take the territory. It's a neat-sounding idea, but the mode doesn't get beyond this base level of strategy. You just keep earning money, adding dudes, sending them after territories, and using the to bulk up your defenses, and you do this until the game is over. You don't even get to fight the gang battles yourself using the main game engine.

Finally, there are the parlor games, all of which can be played multiplayer--not via other PSPs, mind you, but via a single PSP, where you hand the system off to people for their turns. The back of the box does show a game-sharing feature, but it's actually just a single-player demo. The parlor games include the usual array of British pub activities, like darts, skittles, UK and US pool, and a peculiar variation on the popular cell-phone game Snake. The actions for playing these games are pretty simple. For the darts game, for example, you simply tap a button at the right time to set your aim, time another button press to set your angle, and let 'er rip. The pool game doesn't involve much more than aiming your shot with the analog stick and then setting your power using a quick power meter. You can't call any of these games more than a brief, amusing distraction, but for what they are, they're not bad. It's just unfortunate they're not included in a better game.

Don't worry about this guy. He'll get up and walk away in a second.

Gangs of London does a better job with its presentation than with most anything else. The in-game graphics are not the highlight, however. Though the game looks like a scaled-down version of the last Getaway game, the only thing that's impressive about it is the size of the city. The character models are drab and don't animate well, and you'll run into a number of weird glitches, frame rate drops, and camera issues as you play, especially while you're driving. On the plus side, the game does use kind of a neat, comic-book-styled cutscene system, similar to the one in Max Payne. These panels have some nice-looking artwork, and the voice acting that accompanies them is great. It's the same brand of bawdy, English rhyming slang-heavy dialogue that the Getaway games featured, and while it's a bit much at times for those without a master's degree in Cockney, the actors sell the parts well and come off amusingly without hamming it up too terribly. The one odd aspect of the voice acting is its selective bleeping of curses. "F" words, "S" words, "C" words, and the like all get bleeped, but plenty of offensive references to female anatomy go untouched. If you're going to leave all those in, why not leave in the "F" bombs as well? The game already sports an M rating.

Regardless of your affinity for British profanity, Gangs of London isn't a game worth playing. The mission designs go beyond pedestrian into the realm of actively unpleasant less than an hour into the experience, and all the ancillary modes in the world can't make up for weak controls and bland gameplay. The truly perplexing thing about the game is that many of these issues have been around the Getaway series for years now and are somehow made significantly worse in this game. Unless you're absolutely desperate for an expensive parlor-game simulator for your PSP, Gangs of London is best left on the shelf.