I am continuing with the rather futile task of playing all the video games.

So within minutes of finishing off Everything or Nothing, I popped recently released 007: Legends into my Xbox 360 and continued on my journey.

Game 000007: 007: Legends

I spent about 8 hours playing through the campaign on normal difficulty over the weekend, plus an additional couple of hours checking out the challenge mode and multiplayer. Alex's recent review of this new game is pretty spot on, so I'll try to keep this short.

In many ways my experience with Legends was almost exactly the opposite of Everything or Nothing. The game is a fully functioning competent FPS, clearly modelled on the Call of Duty franchise. There's nothing wrong with that - the controls are largely intuitive and the graphics are good, but nothing special. Moreover the XP system, a sort of in game achievement system where you can spend your points on weapon, gadget and skill upgrades is a nice touch. Where the game really lets itself down though, is on its level design.

There are actually some really great sections in this game. In particular, the zero gravity combat at the end of the Moonraker mission stands out for trying something a little different and really pulling it off. (The achievement worth no points... or 0G also made me laugh). It's just a shame that most of these brief enjoyable segments feel lost in a sea of unimaginative combat situations. For an eight hour game to feel padded is really saying something.

To the developer's credit, they did occasional try and break up the monotony with Batman-esque scan the background for clues sections. These environmental based puzzles were fun the first couple of times, but soon got repetitive... and the forced stealth sections of the game, only served to demonstrate that that those mechanics felt broken. Clearly an interesting idea, whereby you could use predictable AI behaviours in order to navigate around the environment unseen. However these sections soon became a matter of trial and error, as it was never clear when and where you could leave a body lying around without anybody noticing it, and triggering the alarms.

The multiplayer was decent, but nothing better than you would find in almost any other modern game, The leader board based challenge levels were also a nice addition, allowing you to really customise everything from your health, to enemy accuracy, (and even turn on paint ball mode!). Modifying the 15 or so variables for each of the ten challenges affects your score multiplier for that mission - and experimenting with that was a lot of fun... right until I reached the forced stealth levels, which I hated, and so that ended my time with that!

Although the meta plot (in which they attempt to explain why all of these films have been packaged into one game), is brief and confusing, the game does a reasonable job of narrating each of the five films it chooses to explore, doing a serviceable job of reminiscing over some of the memorable parts of each film. The end of the campaign really took me by surprise though - it just stopped without any sort of conclusion, and then advertised the upcoming Skyfall DLC. I don't think that I'll be returning to play that.

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Next on the list is the sequel to Agent Under Fire; 007: Nightfire. I seem to have acquired both the Xbox and the PS2 version of this. So if anybody has any insights as to which version is better, please let me know.