Rating: 4.4/5
The world is under threat from the nefarious industrialist Raphael Drake and it is up to you to stop him. In all honesty the plot is somewhat lacking in this first person shooter from EA but leads to some fun set pieces and plenty of intense shootouts. There is nothing here you have not seen before in countless other shooters with the weapon loadout being fairly standard (with a couple of exotics in the Pheonix and Golden guns) and Bond's gadgets rarely coming into play. In a nod to the fact Bond is supposedly a spy there are some mandatory stealth sections and many missions allow for a slightly more stealthy approach but as with many shooters this comes off more as annoying than fun in most cases, the ai being too stupid yet too insanely accurate and reactive to make the stealth shine. Really the game comes into its own (like many shooters) in its multiplayer. Here you have all the modes you would expect from Deathmatch to Capture the Flag with a few variations where you must protect a specific member of your team or steal data. Annoyingly much is held back from you till you have advanced quite far into the single player with many iconic characters locked unless you manage to acheive some insane scores (generated from time spent, damage taken etc.) on missions. Again this is fairly standard shooter fare with small things like remote control vehicles used to try and give it a more distinct flavour. Perhaps my favourite feature is the addition of multiplayer bots, something severely lacking in many modern shooters. Whilst completely brain dead and not capable of playing on one of the maps due to it being particularly complex they do pad out the numbers if you can't manage to grab enough mates to play an aging mediocre shooter.
You also need an emulator to run this game. To grab one quickly, please check out our GCN emulators section.