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Dom Robinson reviews
Sony
- Price: £34.99
- Players: 1-2
- Widescreen: Yes
- Online: No
- Multiplayer between PSPs: No
Lock Stock and several Gangs of London?
That’s how this latest game, from the creators of The Getaway and its sequel, The Getaway: Black Monday, appears to play out.
If you’ve played either of those games then you’ll know what to expect, but for those who haven’t, Gangs of London has a style similar to the Grand Theft Auto series, but instead of taking a trip round the fast lanes and faster ladies of Miami, you’ll be goin’ ‘dahn Sarth’ to London to tell the baddies to “shat your maath”. Okay, enough of the stereotypes… well, until you switch on your PSP that is and indulge in the main story mode that allows you to play the part of one of five different gangs and over 60 missions that mainly involve shooting at baddies and driving about.
And while you play across a large map, it’s good to see that a similar look to the Getaway games has been used here because if there’s one thing that was impressive about those games it was the style that made you feel like you were driving down the streets of our capital city.
As you’ll go through the different missions, the main aim will be to attack another gang’s territory and take it over, which places it in a similar mould to sections of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where riots would break out and only the massacre of baddies blindly running towards you would resolve the situation. Personally, I started out by going up against Zakharov and his men, including a cool-looking shootout over the River Thames, before moving on to the Triads.
Gangs of London features comic-book style sequences at the start of each mission and some amusing cockney banter during them – the voices of which clearly featured Ray Burdis, who has been in Manchild and so many more other shows than you can shake a stick at, plus the whiny, rat-faced one from Lock Stock…, but as you progress through each one you can instruct your gang to beat people up or shoot them and you can join in too, since it’s largely a team effort, the plan being that if you die, one of your henchmen will take over. However, there were times when I tried to make my character gesture ‘go forward’ to colleague and he only went part of the way and then didn’t continue!
Since this was made by the same people as The Getaway games, they may know their London, but it still exhibits some of the same control problems. Turning round, for instance, is a real problem as you really need two analog sticks one to turn yourself round and the other to move the camera so you can get a far better view of whats coming. This is hindered further by the fact that aiming your weapon is a far from acceptable task and when you do get into it, there’s not a lot going on to task your gaming muscle as the mission objectives are very repetitive.
Problems also occur with the enemy themselves. Firstly, they don’t show up on radar map so you don’t know where they are, which really gives them an unfair advantage, and when they die you can’t take any of their weapons or ammo. However, they clearly like the searing pain of hot metal entering their flesh as when you shoot them after lining up your target, if you get one or two shots off and then have to reload, the just continue to stand there waiting to get hit again!
Of course, one thing blasting away in public view will do is attract the attention of the local constabulary, but don’t fret as it’s easy to escape them. During one mission, just one police car came after me and after ramming me several times, I got out as mine and their cars were about to explode. They were easily dispensed with and no other cops took their place so I could carry on the mission in peace. If this was a GTA game the place would be swarming with them. More baffling behaviour was experienced as I tried one mission several times before agreeing to skip it and, instead of expecting to be able to try it again later, the PSP declared “Mission Success”. Pardon?!
While there’s some nice stereo sound separation in Gangs of London, there may be over 60 missions in total in which to try your hand but all the levels are so repetitive that once you’ve seen off one gang you’ve pretty much seen all there is to see in Story Mode.
However, that’s not all there is to do in this title. The Free-roaming mode allows you to drive around; be a London tourist and ask for directions to landmarks to photograph; “Cause Havoc” – to do just that and score some points; the “Speed Trap” option sees your car rigged with a bomb so drive to the destination before it blows; “Riot Control” pits you as a riot officer arresting the baddies causing chaos against the clock; “Getaway” does what it says on the tin and sees you separating yourself from the police – so similar to the “Speed Trap” mode, then; “The Knowledge” allows you to be a taxi driver for a day round London, and finally, “Four Weeks Later” shows that the inhabitants of London have turned into zombies. Pardon? Yes, zombies. Fight ’em off to save the town. Or let ’em take it over because Red Ken’s just going to increase the Congestion Charge and pretend to get the Olympics ready on time.
I also tried the Gang-battle mode, which allows you to take over territories, but in a turn-based card game which seemed odd as the idea is you just command gangs to go to those areas to take them over without seeing any of the usual actual violent action. Pass.
Mini-games are available in The Pub with darts, pool and skittles, but even if you do play against someone on these, they’re not multiplayer, you just take it in turns to use the PSP unless you want a CPU opponent in the form of a character from the Story mode. There’s also a basic Snake-style arcade game but this became very tedious before long.
Overall, Gangs of London has all been seen before and done better so unless you must make a trip to the city the media never stop going on about, whether it’s to do with the Olympics, a poisoned Russian spy or even a blustery day that sounds newsworthy once you use the word ‘tornado’ in there, Gangs of London does come rather hard to recommend.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.