Eurocom has done its best to make Bond play like a COD game, and the same can be said for the looks as well. But unfortunately the game is several years behind the latest COD games, and there’s a general lack of pop and fizz to the game. Whilst the level of action in COD has perhaps become overly and excessively pervasive in recent years, if Eurocom aren’t to go down that route then they really should have done what they could to improve upon the textures and quality of the aged CoD engine. There’s also remarkably inconsistency. The Moonraker levels look decent, and so does most of Goldfinger, but Die Another Day in particular just looks very dated.

 

 

The sound design shows the same budget approach. The script is poor, and they couldn’t even be bothered to get Daniel Craig in as Bond, instead plumping for a very poor soundalike who regularly feels like he is fluffing his lines. The Bond themes are all used well, but any original music feels like it’s designed to rip off Bond without getting sued, rather than being a part of the experience.

 

 

Multiplayer has always been a key facet of Bond games, and it does make a return here. Unfortunately, despite the decent number of game modes, and the opportunity for up to 12 players to duke it out online, the maps just aren’t very good, being tired re-hashes of single-player levels.

 

 

As a result, the game already feels under-populated, and with the imminent launches of Halo 4 and CODBO2, I very much doubt that anyone will be playing this at all within a few weeks of launch. It’s a shame, because even if the maps are at best average, some of the game modes and weapons, combined with classic Bond characters could still make for a decent game.

 

 

"007 Legends" isn’t a total failure, but it’s a sad return to the mediocrity so long associated with the Bond games. There’s clearly something rotten at the core of the whole relationship between the movie and game studios, and it’s unclear if this can even ever be resolved. With a wooden stand-in for Daniel Craig, poorly thought out updates to classic films, and an over-reliance on CoD gameplay, but with graphics, sounds, scripting and mechanics that lag 2-3 years behind the main series, Bond was always onto a loser, and that’s a shame. The locations, girls, guns and cars should make for a classic, but once again we’re lumped with anything but. Even Bond fans will no doubt have better shooters available this year, and only fanatics should consider picking this one up before a price drop.

 

 

 

  

 

 

+ Bond themes