007 Is Back I Guess
007 is back and with little to no fanfare. The new installment in the 007 saga is published by Activsion and developed by Bizarre Creations the team that brought you Blur and The Club. This game comes out alongside the release of the remake of 007 for the Wii and DS. Is this game worth your time, when the holiday game season is in full effect with tons of options to choose from?
In Blood Stone you play as the Daniel Craig Bond with the assistance of M and MI-6. The story comes from the writer of Golden Eye and has you traveling across the Globe trying to track down a villain that has stolen a biochemical secret project. Does this sound familiar? The story is nothing original and it works for a 007 game but it is nothing special. The ending is very anticlimactic and you will not be missing anything if you choose to skip the cut scenes. Although, you will miss some product placement that is a must have in any 007 property.
Blood Stone's game play is mostly setup as a cover based 3rd person shooter with some driving levels thrown in. The game has you going level by level dispatching enemies that almost all the look the same expect for a couple of outfit changes. The game play is fast paced due to the ability to mostly head shot every enemy you come across. Even when you pop out of cover and zoom in on your iron sights the cursor goes straight to the enemies’ heads. You also have the ability to perform a takedown when you get close to an enemy. Takedowns are little cut scenes of 007 doing some hand to hand combat that you don’t have control of. These range from doing stealth takedowns, to grabbing someone from the other side of cover and taking them out. I found the takedowns to be one of the very few fun things about the game. I would sit and wait behind cover and wait till the enemies are reloading and just run out and take them out. There is enough verity in the animations so you won’t get the same one over and over again.
Along with the takedown ability you also have the ability to use focus aim. Focus aim is basically a slow down ability that can be used only a limited amount of times. You fill your focus aim slots whenever you perform a takedown, but you are only able to fill three slots at a time. All the focus aim does is slow down time and then zooms in on an enemies head so you can get an easier shot. I really never used this ability do to the fact that head shoots happen so often without the assistance of focus aim.
That brings me to enemy AI, wow the enemy AI is not good. I would just have guys walk right up to me for no reason. It was like they were asking me to do a takedown on them. I had this happen to me a number of times. Even when they ducked down behind cover they never really got all the way down, usually just enough of their head was exposed to pull off a headshot.
With this being a 007 game you would think there would be a lot of gadgets and cool things to mess with, but there isn’t. The one and only gadget you acquire is your cell phone. Your cell phone acts as sonar, kind of like what Batman had in Batman: Arkham Asylum. With your cell phone you are able to see enemies, what kind of guns they are carrying, and see where your next objective is. You will also use it to find intelligence info that is located throughout levels and also to hack into surveillance cameras to disable them. The cell phone becomes a key item in the game when I was playing. I would constantly be using it to see where my next objective is and where the enemies are located. Since I spent most of my time looking at my cell phone sonar I didn’t get to see some of the games graphics.
The cut scenes look good at times but the facial animations of Bond and M are just awful. The in game graphics look good and they have sharp colors to them. There is just not that much to say about how the game looks. I never experience any slow down at any point, and the driving levels look especially good.
The driving levels in Blood Stone are fun but they kind of seem unnecessary to the plot of the story. I think Bizarre Creations decided to through those in since they know how to make car levels. The driving missions are mostly made up of 007 chasing after a suspect and at times running them off the road. The driving missions’ just offer up some variety to the game play and it offers the games set piece moments kind of like Split/Second did, with buildings falling all around you and bridges collapsing in front of you.
After all is said and done 007 Blood Stone will take you anywhere from 4 to 6 hours depending on the difficulty level you play on. The game offers up some ok 3 person shooting and some good driving levels but nothing really stands out. Blood Stone is a good game if you are in the mood for a 3 person shooting game or if you are a James Bond fan otherwise I would wait until a price drop. It did not leave any lasting impressions on me and in about a month I will have forgotten that this even came out. This game should have been released when there was nothing else coming out, not in the middle of the holiday game season.