007 Legends Review (360)

Bond… James Bond… 50 years and that still sounds cool!

I have very little shame in admitting that I own all of the James Bond films, a pretty good selection of the games, a couple of the Ian Fleming novels, and even the ‘007 edition’ of the board game Scene-it. So based on this, you can probably deduce that I’m a pretty big fan. While the film series just celebrated its 50th anniversary, the video games have only really been popular since 1997’s undisputed classic ‘Goldeneye’. While there were a limited number of side-scroller and text based games before this, Goldeneye was where Bond broke through into the gaming scene, and set a precedent for most of the franchise’s game entries (as well as most fps games) that followed, be they film tie-ins or original stories. One fundamental problem with this is that while there have been 23 movies in the series; gamers have only ever really been allowed to play 5 of them as games (not including the pre-Goldeneye era). Despite this, I can’t say I’ve ever found myself wishing I could play through any of the earlier films in game form, and in fact I’ve actually on the whole preferred the games that had an original story, as opposed to being film tie-ins. Despite this, for the sake of a more interesting review, I’ll assume that 007 Legends has been produced based on fan demand as opposed to a lack of original ideas. So the basic idea of 007 Legends is that it allows you to play through sections from 5 of the previous Bond films, which have never before been playable. This is wrapped up in a fairly flimsy and largely unnecessary premise involving Bond having flashbacks to previous adventures after being shot in the opening scene of Skyfall. The game presents you with 5 different scenarios spanning the history of the franchise, and in combination with the Skyfall level set for release this week, there will be one film from each of the actors who have uttered the words “Bond� James Bond” over the past 50 years featured in the game. I have to admit that some of the films seem like odd choices to me, given the selection that the producers had to choose from, but I am assuming that some of the choices were driven by which actors they could get to return for voice-overs, or which films hadn’t already been covered in other games, but the lack of original voice actors and even likenesses could suggest otherwise. For example, I don’t understand the reasoning for including the character ‘Jinx’ in the ‘Die Another Day’ section of the game if neither Halle Berry’s voice or likeness could be used.

Repetition is something that you will undoubtedly notice within this game, with each of the 5 adventures following a largely similar pattern

Another strange choice by the producers was to set all of the films in the present-day Bond universe and use Daniel Craig’s likeness through the whole game, but with the same voice actor attempting to re-create the voices of the different actors, with varying degrees of success. It just feels a little odd to see Bond using his phone to analyse the chemical makeup of solutions in ‘Moonraker’, or sending someone flying through the ejector seat of his Aston Martin DBS in ‘Goldfinger’. This brings me fairly naturally onto the gadgets themselves. No 007 experience would be complete without an array of high-tech gadgets, which is why it seems slightly disappointing that given 50 years of heritage and 23 films to draw on, the game only equips the player with 3 gadgets throughout, none of which really provide the most original functions, and of the functions they do provide, even less are particularly useful, and those which are become stale quickly, as they are used repeatedly in the same contexts throughout the game. Repetition is something that you will undoubtedly notice within this game, with each of the 5 adventures following a largely similar pattern, which consists of: infiltrating an enemy stronghold, finding the bad guy’s office, using the smartphone to search for clues within the office or elsewhere, some sort of escape scene, and then a showdown with one of the film’s main antagonists, which follows the same format of a punch-up utilising quick-time events. It is telling that while my housemate watched me playing a couple of these sections, he made the comment “This really makes me want to play Fight Night”. The fight scenes do provide a brief breakaway from the majority of the gameplay, but so much more could have been made of the end-of-level bosses (if they really needed to include them in the first place), without even mentioning how wrong it felt to be facing Blofeld in a boxing match! The game is based primarily on the Call Of Duty engine, and while it feels like a slightly older version, it contains all of the hallmarks of the CoD series – even down to the ability to modify your loadout and attach ACOG, red dot, and Reflex sights to your primary weapons. Unfortunately the game tries to shoehorn in various stealth sections, and unlike the Call Of Duty series, these don’t work particularly well. Most of the time in these sections I found myself simply shooting my way through, as it took less time, and is obviously what the game was primarily designed for, but certain missions did not allow this, and were automatically failed if an alarm was triggered, which made gameplay pretty drawn out and aggravating in places, but thankfully these weren’t all that frequent. I think one of the things I found most disappointing about the game is how abruptly it ended after the ‘Moonraker’ mission. After spending a couple of hours slogging through it (mostly due to the aforementioned stealth sections), and finally blasting Hugo Drax into space, I was not treated to a final cutscene, simply to the credits rolling. Presumably this is due to the forthcoming Skyfall level which will wrap up the game properly, but I feel slightly cheated that Activision simply removed the final level from the game, and are releasing it later & advertising it as bonus content. I won’t spend too much time talking about the multiplayer, as I didn’t get a chance to properly test it, but it seemed to include a variety of game modes both online and split-screen, along with a CoD style loadout system, where better weapons are unlocked with experience. In the previous Bond games I have played, the multiplayer has been a lot of fun, and I can imagine that this game would be no exception had I given it a chance. So to sum up, 007 legends feels unfinished, and while drawing on the 50 years of heritage that the Bond franchise has could in theory have produced a great game, it was sadly not executed well enough to be all it could have been. As I previously mentioned, the game is based on the Call of Duty engine, so at it’s core it’s a half decent shooter, but it lacks original ideas and the few that it has are repeated through the whole game and become stale
quickly. Some of the production choices made have given the game a pretty strange and altogether disjointed tone, and the game feels inconsistent with most of the source material it draws from. While none of these things are major problems, 007 Legends has been released at a time where the market is saturated with fps games that dwarf it, so unless you’re a hardcore Bond fan who’s not too alienated by the changes the producers made in the game, I’d probably pick up something else.

3 / 5