James Bond: From Russia With Love
Verdict: Desperate corporate spying
Platform: Xbox, PS2.
Rating: 2½/5
EA’s latest in a long line of average Bond games attempts to break from the shadow of Rare’s highly regarded (and never bettered) Golden Eye by shifting the game into the 3rd person. A move that as well as allowing them to use Sean Connery’s expensively licenced likeness allows them to introduce new features to the franchise - a possible bid to leave the creative rut they’ve been stuck in.
It’s endemic and accepted in the industry to copy in-vogue ideas from other games - bullet time, cell shading, rag doll physics...whatever’s new and used but From Russia with Love takes the biscuit. It’s bursting at the seams with borrowed features and although this isn’t a bad thing, none of the things included are quite as good as their original counterparts. Still, it’s the most diverse Bond from them yet.
EA likes to make its games easy - I know this from experience through my work as a games tester on 007: Nightfire. Their focus groups called for the game to be dumbed down on many occasions (once to the cry that they don’t understand doors - so make them flash! I kid you not...). In this case though it’s the gunplay that feels too dumbed down - an over reliance on auto lock-ons that remove any need for skill (they may as well remove the shoot button). The ‘Bond Focus’ mode however cynically reintroduces aiming as a ‘feature’. Congrats to EA for renaming aiming as a new innovation.
What ultimately lets it down though is one of the most important aspects of any 3rd person game - the camera. It just takes far too much work - I’m supposed to be a spy not a camera man! So much of your time is spent struggling with it, keeping it focused on the action - every corner you turn you have to force it to follow you, just to see where you’re going. Coupled with a bizarre momentum on it and the games’ graphic engine creaking, groaning and slowing down nearly every time you move it - you’re looking at a head ache inducing adventure.
Not very suave indeed.