The Getway: Black Monday is the movie Guy Ritchie should have made instead of Swept Away. It is a really super good Guy Ritchie movie. It is full of Cockney accents and high-speed edits and jolly English gallows humour. You will enjoy watching it like no other video game this year.

What you will not enjoy nearly so much is playing it. For while Black Monday really wants to be a movie, it is still a video game, and it demands not just your attention but also your thumbs. Sadly, the thumby bits are really not very good at all.

The game tells the story of an eruption of gang-related violence in modern-day London. As we begin, we meet a special-forces cop named Ben "Mitch" Mitchell, who is just returning to active duty, two years after a dodgy shooting nearly ended his career. Mitch is gruff and highly-strung. We see the tension in his eyes. In his voice we hear something that might be fatigue or might be grief. We know this man means well. We aren't sure if we trust him. With just a few words and a few carefully-composed shots, we learn great volumes about Mitch. We wonder if he'll be OK.

Then the cut-scene ends and you take control. The voice actor takes a break. You are Mitch now. What is your motivation? How do you feel about returning to to job? Can you handle the stress? Will your co-workers accept you?

You will not have the answer to any of these questions, because the questions themselves will not occur to you. In your hands, under your thumbs, Mitch is not a film character but a video game avatar. You do not care about his feelings. He is a little tank you drive around, looking for bad guys to shoot.

He does not steer as easily as you would like. He feels sluggish and poorly-tuned. His arm passes through solid objects at inopportune moments. The trauma of the past two years notwithstanding, he is not nuanced at all. He is clumsy and poorly thought out and badly rendered. He moves as if his shorts are pinching him.

Mitch is a police officer, so sometimes he arrests bad guys instead of shooting them. This is a useful way to calm a room down, because simply walking up to a villain and pushing the "arrest" button does the trick. Any other bad guys who happen to be firing at you will all take a break while the arrest is in progress, and will only resume the shooting once the cuffs are on. This is stupid and jarring, but it will let you out of more than one dodgy situation.

The driving is terrific. Because Black Monday really wants to be a movie and not a video game, it dispenses with video game conventions like the on-screen map or the radar pointer or the heads-up display. Instead, it simply shows you your car on the streets of London, beautifully rendered and looking astonishingly like the real thing. If it is time to make a turn, the signal lights on your car will blink. More video games should try this. Health meters are for wimps.

After a while with Mitch we meet Eddie, a smalltime boxer and smalltime crook, and we meet Sam, a beautiful 19-year-old computer whiz. Both of them are also subtle and nuanced characters who are great to watch but irritating to control.

An idiotic but durable conceit of our age has it that video games will really only emerge as a cultural force when they have mastered narrative. Someday, the promise goes, when the voice acting gets good and the back stories begin to take on the ring of truth, video games will finally win the hearts of smart people who hang out at the Spoke Club.

That is dumb because video games are not about stories. Video games are games. Video games have far more in common with Monopoly and euchre and pachisi than they have with, say, novels. A good video game is a play-space with rules and a goal. To achieve the goal you may have to solve puzzles, or you may have to practice a task over and over, fine-tuning your reflexes and getting your speed up, or you may have to lean on your luck.

Video games are about knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. They are not about dark family secrets. They are not. Enough already.