Game - 007: Legends (Xbox 360)

James Bond returns in... Muckraker

There were a surfeit of Bond-related puns I could have chosen for the headline here. Oh Hell, More Shoddy Shooters (O.H.M.S.S) was tempting, as were The Spy Who Screwed Me, Buy Another Game, and Dr No More For The Love Of God. But even puns so tortured they would welcome a seatless chair and a knotted rope would seem to lend this latest 'effort' from Eurocom - after the only-just satisfactory GoldenEye Reloaded - an air of grandeur which it certainly doesn't earn. 'Muckraker' seemed far more appropriate to capture the general atmosphere of cheap, shoddy laziness in which this game must have been produced, the odour of which pervades any attempt to play it like an old corpse decomposing in a dusty house surrounded by faded relics of former glory. But enough about Roger Moore.

Drax's men and Blofeld's Piz Gloria guards wear their cool uniforms
from the movies, so there's that, I guess.

I don’t know whether the game was patched after its release, but at my time of playing, 007: Legends didn't even have the decency to be amusingly bad. The oft-mentioned stealth kill animations, or lack thereof, that result in Bond disabling guards with a blood-spewing punch to the buttock somehow failed to materialise throughout my playthrough: the fairly varied animations for stealth takedowns – apparently duplicated frame-for-frame from Goldeneye Reloaded – went off without any amusing hitches. Fortunately for reviewers looking to exercise their bile, the game is plagued with plenty of poor design choices and cut corners to pick at until the whole thing unravels like a Christmas jumper knitted by a blind, one-handed grandmother in the late stages of Parkinson’s.

The game's short stages consist of missions based on: Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Die Another Day, Licence To Kill, and Moonraker, expanded by the Skyfall DLC pack. In the case of the classic movie levels, the stages generally consist of the final set-piece that results in the defeat of the villain, and one previous level that sets up the ultimate conflict: for example, the Goldfinger stage consists of Bond's infiltration (none too stealthy here) of Auric Enterprises, followed by the final battle at Fort Knox, in which Bond plays a much larger part than he did in the movie. The missions generally consist of Bond progressing through linear levels and shooting all the uniformed thugs who get in his way, though there are several ill-advised and poorly-implemented stealth sections sprinkled throughout, further restricted by instant-fail-if-spotted mechanics and a lack of alternate routes to explore or scope out guard positions with, so generally you proceed through the sections, taking out a guard, being spotted by another one, and reloading with your new knowledge of the location of the second guard, and repeat until you've done this for every guard in the room. God help you if the stealth section lasts longer than the one area though, because it won't get more fun.

Amazingly, this is quite a good likeness of Toby Stephens as Graves.

Somehow, Judi Dench (M), Naomie Harris (Moneypenny), Rory Kinnear (Tanner), Michael Lonsdale (Hugo Drax) and Toby Stephens (Gustav Graves), amongst others, allowed themselves to be roped into this – Daniel Craig perhaps having smelt a dud of a game and excused himself – and while it is generally pleasant to see the faces and hear the voices of the movie canon in the game, one cannot help feeling a twinge of sympathy for the actors as they repeat rewritten dialogue that carries the same meaning as their equivalent lines in the cinematic adventures, but without any of the associated wit, charm or panache. In fact, the likenesses of the actors are generally quite good – with the exception of Daniel Craig, whose rugged features, while recognisable, seem to have partially eluded 3D modellers ever since the Quantum of Solace video game that marked Activision’s first entry in the license, and who here seems to have been roughly sculpted from mashed potato before being encased in shiny plastic and painted like Action Man – but this only seems to serve as an unpleasant reminder of how unpolished the game is in other areas. If the entire game had been produced with the same care and attention that apparently resulted in the particularly excellent rendering of Toby Stephen’s Gustav Graves, the game may have been able to swing more positive scores for itself based on graphics alone. Unfortunately, the rest of the graphics are none-too impressive. Enemy models are repeated ad infinitum. Environments are serviceable and varied, but not detailed, and lighting is generally flat, uninteresting, and not dynamic: characters will often not cast shadows, and will themselves not appear any different whether standing in light or in shade. Coupled with the fact that items held by characters seem instead to be floating millimeters from their hands and dead enemies seem to lie flat on the ground like a puddle on a metal tabletop, there is a distressing lack of substance and weight to characters, objects and scenery. This insubstantial weakness continues to infect every facet of gameplay, including the sound design of the many weapons, and the characters' dialogue. "I'm sorry, I don't believe I caught your-" "James Bond" - so goes the curt exchange between Pussy Galore (if you thought Bond turned her to his side easily in the movie, wait till you see what passes for persuasion here) and Bond. I know that they didn't manage to get Daniel Craig to play the part, but they could at least attempt to emulate the sparking dialogue that is the hallmark of every Bond film, even the bad ones (except Quantum of Solace, which is barely a Bond film at all). They did, however, replace Halle Berry's voice and likeness with another actress' in the Die Another Day section, so I suppose we should be grateful for that.

Remember the classic scene in Goldfinger when Sean Connery shot
down a helicopter with an M16? Neither do I.

The base gameplay is essentially Diet Call of Duty, as Bond proceeds through linear reimaginings of the movies’ famous locations, with many more added shooting sections, plinking away at identikit guards with a wide selection of weapons that sadly are only really distinguished by looks – the guns themselves carry no weight, both feeling and sounding anaemic to shoot. I won’t blame the developers for their lack of faith to the movies in adding these shooting sequences – after all, did Rare’s seminal, genre-defining GoldenEye, the Bond title against which all others are measured, not use similar artistic license to work better as a game? – but the fact is that the shooting itself is so lacklustre and ineffective that it becomes impossible to commend the expanded storylines. The weakness of the shooting is not helped by the scarcity of enemy death animations, which all – regardless of where they are shot – seem to consist of clutching at their shoulder before falling over sideways, whereupon they somewhat unconvincingly ragdoll and usually leave themselves propped up against walls or crates at spine-breaking right angles. 

Things are not helped by the free Skyfall DLC expansion, which is the final part of the main game but kept out of the boxed release to protect gamers from spoilers – about the only instance of goodwill and thoughtfulness in this slapdash effort. Proceedings are not aided by a small handful of unwelcome vehicle sequences, the nadir of which is a motorbike chase through Istanbul after Patrice, the assassin from the opening sequence of Skyfall. Aside from the dangerously psychotic Istanbul motorists who all lurch about the streets at Mach 3 in their identikit white cars, the motorbike handles like a drunken, excitable squirrel with rubber beach balls glued to its feet, slamming into parked vans and market stalls with wild abandon at the slightest twitch of the oversensitive controls. Immediately following this, Eurocom somehow fashioned an even worse sequence: an old-school boss fight with Patrice in Shanghai; chasing him through endless glass hallways, plinking away at him with the pea-shooter bullets of Bond’s P99, chipping away at a health bar so gargantuan that the hardy assassin can take somewhere around 200 bullets (actually an accurate figure, as this is a little over the total ammo capacity for the pistol) before going down, while he himself totes a silenced rapid-fire sniper rifle with 3-shot kills. Even the tremendously old-school battle with Mecha-Hitler in Wolfenstein 3D felt more advanced and responsive than this. If it weren't for the fact that, without the Skyfall expansion, the game has no ending whatsoever, I would discount this awful pair of levels and add on two more points to the final score. As it is...

007: Legends is a barely competent shooter, and about the best that can be said for it is that the enemies do contrive to eventually fall over when you point the loud ends of guns at them, so if all you want is a basic shooter to kill a little time before a more major release, buy it very cheap and call it a 5/10. If, however, you were after a more polished shooting experience, or a faithful, loving reimagining of the rich Bond history with flair and polish - and as GoldenEye was 17 years ago, don't we deserve one? - then there can be only one fair score:

2/10 - Shaky, and not stirring