Replaying this because of the recent news of London Studio being closed down. I played this a ton back in the day. It was far from perfect, and this latest playthrough has only made that much more obvious. But there's still some charming stuff that keeps me from being overly bored or offended.

The main attraction is the story mode, which sees you picking one of the 5 gangs to play as, conquering London's underworld by taking the other gang' territories. Structurally, this mode is decent. Each territory is taken by doing classic GTA-style bite-sized missions, but there's no free roam in this mode; instead, you choose the missions on a map-based menu. The variety of the missions are pretty good. And I particularly like how the story for each of the playable gangs are distinct enough in terms of the kinds of characters you'll see, and how you kinda grow attached to the playable characters in each gang, even with how light the story is. The story is mostly being told with comic book-style still graphics, and it works fine enough for what it is. It definitely does the job of setting the game apart from similar open world games.

But the gameplay core is where the game falters. The controls are quite clunky, mostly due to the PSP's lack of a second analog stick. Your character moves like a car, and the gunplay is mostly reduced to locking on to an enemy and just gunning them down mindlessly, while trying to awkwardly manuever around. A lot of the missions feature actual car driving, and the handling and physics are overall somewhat stiff. There's also some very skeletal stealth mechanics, which are thankfully not required too often.

There's also the problem of the enemy and ally AI. Their pathing can be so abysmal at times. I have seen more than enough enemies trying to get to my location from another side of the mission area, and for some reason they can't fathom that there's a wall separating us, so they just keep running at that wall, and I have to be the one paying them a visit instead. Same goes for the ally AI. They can slow you down quite a bit since some missions require all of your squad to be at the mission goal area, and they can get stuck in some random part of the level, so you have to control them manually.

Despite these glaring problems, the game's vibes are just unique and tasteful enough for it to be, at the very least, an interesting experience. The awkward nature of the in-engine cutscenes, combined with the cheesy 2000s aimed-at-adults tone of the comic book presentation is a pretty entertaining combination.

Rest in peace London Studio. I hope all their employees can land back on their feet quickly and without too much trouble. I should get to playing the Getaway games sometime soon.

Lastly, a word of caution: this game is pretty glitchy on emulators. Some missions are just straight up bugged for one reason or another.

P.S. forgot to mention the soundtrack. It's nothing too special but there's some nice tunes here and there. Really like the menu track and the Kane' Firm theme.