For fifty years, the likes of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan have graced our screens as the British super-spy James Bond. Unless your childhood was either severely deprived or you spent the majority of it in a Buzz Lightyear costume; licking your elbows and dribbling on your own kneecaps, then the iconic figure that is 007 probably played a rather key role in growing up. It may be true that the majority of Britain resembles Austin Powers more than Bond, but then again the only people in England who are rich enough to drive an Aston Martin look like Q and like playing golf with their tweed jackets and butler called Quincy. For all of this nostalgia the developers down at Eurocom decided to make a sort of Greatest Hits: Bond Edition, which brings about as much disappointment as Timothy Dalton.
The first, of many, issues I’m going to raise is the campaign’s length. I’ll keep this brief, like the campaign itself, and announce half-heartedly that it took me a mere five hours to do a complete playthrough of the campaign. That is not an ode to me as a gaming God, but more to development team who, by all accounts, seem to have been more the aforementioned Buzz Lightyear dribble monster than Bond enthusiasts. Not only did they make the game as short as Odd Job in the Nintendo 64 version of Goldeneye, but they seem to have gutted all the best Bond moments and just stapled them to your face anarchically laughing, screaming at you like a peasant to enjoy the game because you may vaguely remember this moment from a previous film. I don’t consider myself the most energetic of people, but even I can say that taking five films that have already been made, making the story somehow worse and then only doing it for five hours seems like the epitome of laziness. They do have several difficulties to play through, and certain ‘Challenges’ for you to complete – but because you pretty much unlock everything necessary in the first five minutes, the only reason you’d want to replay this game is if you had a giant diamond cutting laser pointing at your gonads.
As for an actual storyline the game starts with you being shot off a train into a lake and therefore your mind decides the most reasonable thing to do, as opposed to try and survive, would be to dream of all those great times in your life where people were trying to kill you. That’s right. That’s it. The entire storyline consists of simply dreaming up previous ones. You can’t really even claim spoilers on that one because there’d have to actually be a storyline to spoil. Due to them cramming all five storylines into one game you get very little time to relate to any of the characters so whenever a character dies (which apparently is a reoccurring theme in Bond films) you feel about as much emotional pain as you do when you pour sugar into a coffee. When the new film Skyfall gets released there will be free DLC for you to play, an estimated five extra minutes gameplay overall, but I would sincerely recommend using a power drill as a toothbrush before recommending to play that.
As an apparent spark of ingenuity there is also an online multiplayer aspect as well, although the only adjective you could hope to use to describe it is simply looking up Call of Duty. That’s my biggest problem with the game. It all just feels like cheap CoD; a game the community has been complaining already about being old and repetitive after so many years and yet 007 Legends seems to have been a carbon copy of it. The shooting style, the loadout and perk selection, the Host Migration – it’s all something we’ve grown bored of over the past few years and it’s not even like this one has been done any better. If you want a bad, linear and otherwise monotonous campaign then I’d suggest playing Call of Duty, but this 007 Legends campaign I wouldn’t recommend to anyone – I’m not that cruel, I wouldn’t wish this upon anybody. Quite frankly the five hours I played was enough and by then I already felt like acupuncture would be more enjoyable.
With each film that occurs in the game you have to defeat each of the villains – and I use defeat here in the same way you would say that you defeated a pensioner in the queue at the Post Office. Every single one of the ‘boss battles’ are simply quick time events – I was half expecting at the end that you’d fall on the ground and have to do a slow-motion-throwing-knife-to-face-even-if-you-shoot-for-the-leg shot. I dislike quick time events greatly, in the same way that I hate the sludgy bit you get at the end of a McFlurry or accidently spilling your energy drink on the floor when you’re meant to be writing a review and getting the cream carpet a somewhat shade of yellow so your guests now think you’ve urinated on the floor. That was an excessively long sentence, although I think I deserve an award for managing to write something longer than the script to this game.
If you’re not stuck in a quicktime event or sitting there wishing you were playing something else altogether then you’re probably stuck watching one of the game’s extremely long set pieces; in fact the whole game feels like on elongated set piece where all the best parts are scripted and you’re just told to sit down and watch as James Bond flings himself off of a burning bridge while you’re just left twiddling your thumbs wondering whether you’ve got enough time to boil the kettle before you actually have to play the game again. This is something I severely don’t understand – we’ve all seen the films and the game is the point where we actually want to do the things we’ve already seen, not just watch them all over again in a badly animated visual disease that this game should be classified as.
There’s very few good things to say about this game, and those that you can find you have probably had to think long and hard about before coming to any conclusion. The gameplay is boring and to put it even more simply you get more entertainment from actually watching the films than playing this. You’d of thought that with fifty years of films to explore they could’ve come up with something a bit better than ‘and he woke up and it was all a dream’ but the developers seem to have the same creativity level as a roasted peanut. Whether you like this game or not heavily depends on whether you’re the type of person that has a prized stamp collection. In order to reemberce you for this game, I’ve made a list of everything you can do that is better than 007 Legends:
– Knitting
– Watching Star Wars with Japanese subtitles
– Pirates
– Curling up on the floor and pretending to be a potatoe
– Stopping reading this list of useless things to do with your life