by: Michael Ogunnubi

November 30, 2008

Despite the fact that he hasn’t been a truly good 007 game since GoldenEye, games after games still came out and even managed to get me to like one title very much which was EA’s Everything or Nothing. It may help you to know where I’m coming from on this review, especially when I open with the fact that I think Quantum of Solace has regressed the Bond franchise back to the point it was at when EA first got the franchise and those were dark, dark times my friends.

Now that I’ve got everyone interested with that inflammatory statement let me explain myself. What EA had done with the franchise after their initial failures was to actually make it their own and in so doing they actually made it feel pretty Bondian, yes, that’s a word now in the 00 handbook. In other words, the games became more than just a license that EA was spitting out. Quantum of Solace feels like a licensed game. Not necessarily a bad licensed game, but one none the less. What do I mean by this? I mean that it doesn’t stand on its own, but on the mimicry of other games. It was developed because the license existed, not because an idea for a game existed. This is exactly what EA was doing when they first received the Bond license and it’s the exact wrong way to go about making a Bond game (or any game, for that matter).

What this approach does in general is leave players with a game that doesn’t suck because it is based on games that don’t suck, but also doesn’t do anything to make someone want it. What it does to a Bond game is suck the soul out of it. When you’re playing a game that feels like every other FPS out there and doesn’t differentiate itself except for a cover system that plays like every other cover system out there, then there’s nothing to make the player or the game feel like Bond and everyone knows that the worst Bond material is the material that loses what Bond is. In short, for a Bond fan, who expects his Bond games to at least have some cool Bond moments in them (EA actually had Bond moments that players could find in levels, all Activision has is exploding barrels) Quantum of Solace is as flat as the plastic look on almost every character in the game.

I suppose, though, that not every gamer is as avid a Bond fan, and that some people are just looking for a shooter. Overall this game is a decent shooter and does shooting well, thanks largely in part to Infinity Ward’s COD4 engine. Though if you’ve played COD4 then you’ve played a better game. Part of this stems from the inclusion of a cover system which brings Bond into third person. I was hoping that this meant that players would be able to do some cool things in third person, but really it just means that levels are designed around cover mostly and not FPS shooting. It works out OK for the most part, except when the AI suddenly decides that it doesn’t want to play like a third person cover AI and wants to play like an FPS AI. Suddenly duck and cover gameplay goes out the window as the bad guys charge and swerve. I had many a cheap death because I was shooting bad guys who were playing duck and cover and suddenly an enemy, clearly thinking in FPS mode, came up and put a bullet in my head.