I know, I know, every 007 game since Goldeneye of the old N64 has sucked big ones. It's like the law. Oxygen is a must, Water is needed, and Bond games after Goldeneye are terrible, you know...? I must admit, I gave it a miss upon it's release, thinking it would be awful but my partner bought it for Xmas and I gave it a fair chance. I went into this one expecting it to be the same old but was pleasantly surprised.
I'm a big fan of FPS games: Black on PS2, Call of Duty 4 was the daddy but the servers have become noticeably poor since they released COD5, which, despite it's superior graphics and great gore, is sadly held back by it's WW2 weapons and setting(it's just not as fun, guys!), not to mention the MASSIVE maps online meaning it's harder to find the opposition and leads to endless running around. Farcry II has possibly the best graphics I've ever witnessed, but again the online play kinda sucked a bit, I dunno, something was just missing for me, and the story mode spoiled by too much real-time driving (fun for the first play then it so drags the game down)... The likes of Resistance 2 sucked for me also, poor graphics and aliens never really were my thing to be honest.
I, like many other PS3 owners, just want rid of all the aliens/WW2 nonsense and to have, for a change, a good old-fashioned Rambo style one-man-war mowing people down action game.
So Bond wasn't really expected to match up to any of them, and boy did it. The story mode is better value than the COD games, it is longer, although I ain't seen the movie so was left a little confused by all the twists at times.The action is the best thing I've played since Goldeneye, bar possibly COD4 when it was first released. Sure, the graphics are great in places but on the whole they aren't in the same league as it's other competitors, however, the game's main strength lies in it's sheer fun.
The cover system is a cool add-on which I think most FPS games could benefit from adding in in the future. The likeness to Daniel Craig is fantastic. The 007 pistol with silencer makes you FEEL like you're James Bond. For instance, if you're playing, say, Call of Duty online and you run out of bullets and are left with just a pistol, your first thought would probably be along the lines of "Stick a fork in me, I'm done" but as Bond you don't mind, it's actually quite cool headshotting your totally unaware victims with a silencer whilst in cover haha! For me, this is the best online game out there since COD4. Even more impressive when you take into account that there is no gore at all (NONE!!!), there is not even a ranking system (???wtf???), there are less than 100,000 players on the whole leaderboard, the environments are non-destructible and the cool spy-like mêlée scenario you can do in the story has been replaced by a kinda lame rifle-butt strike for the online modes. There is just something about the pump-action shotguns, p99 silenced pistol and big-ass Rambo guns that make this game a hell of a lot more fun than all those big name titles I listed above, I don't know how they've done it, but Treyarch have taken a franchise that everybody had written off as irrelevant and they've produced one of the finest games they possibly could have done, and I for one will be playing this game from now on until Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 comes to us. Shove your Resistance, mate.
