007 Legends

I thought this was an awesome game, so I played it once. But, my god, I have never expected something that's not really that fun. It's supposed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the James Bond series, revolving around past missions from the James Bond movie franchise, such as Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Moonraker, Licence to Kill, Die Another Day and Skyfall. It had good potential, as seen in demo footage, but was sadly ruined due to Activision rushing it so it could be released before the 23rd Bond movie, Skyfall, came out. Eurocom laid off 75% of their staff less than a month after the game released and shut down a month later, so this is what it looks like when a game is made by people who all know they're about to be fired.

Poor frame-rates, simplistic textures, terrible AI (some of them don't even try to fight you, while others can kill you with just one bullet!), and bad audio (for instance, the guns don't sound realistic; in fact, the guns don't really sound like actual gunshots) all make this game not really that fun overall. The gameplay is too linear and straightforward, almost always telling the player exactly what to do and where to go. It's also repetitive and boring, feeling like a poor man's version of Call of Duty. Some sequences like the snowmobile chase and helicopter minigun segment at the start of On Her Majesty's Secret Service feel like they were just lifted from Modern Warfare 2. It has excessive recycling of assets from Goldeneye 007: Reloaded: most weapon models are just slightly reworked versions of those. Bodies now remain in place unlike Goldeneye Reloaded, but no changes have been made to account for this; stealth becomes very easy once a pen gun is acquired since one of its functions is essentially a silent rocket launcher. There are even tedious and baffling minigames which don't match the actions being performed, such as electrical switchboards being a column-matching puzzle. To make matters worse, some actions that should have minigames, such as defusing bombs, are just action commands.

On the flipside, the store system doesn't even bother to tell you what weapons can use which accessories, meaning the only way to find out is to buy an item and see if it's possible to equip it. In addition, there are several other mechanics the game simply does not explain, like that the push-button security controls are individual buttons that activate or deactivate specific objects, or what the "win" state is in the safecracking minigame.

I was expecting most, if not all, the films. There are only 5 (6 if you count the Skyfall DLC) missions total and 11 levels in total (13 if you count the Skyfall DLC). To make matters worse, On Her Majesty's Secret Service level 1, Licence to Kill level 2 and Die Another Day level 2 are just short driving sequences (Die Another Day level 2 lasts about four minutes, for example), Die Another Day level 3 is ridiculously short and consists mostly of an easy fistfight with Gustav Graves, and most of Skyfall consists of an extended fistfight followed by a boss level that is essentially just two rooms. In fact the Skyfall mission DLC is very rushed and barebones. After Patrice falls to his death following the skyscraper fight, the mission just...ends. The mission is also ridiculously hard on the highest difficulty since Patrice has almost as much health as Bond has ammo, and consists entirely of plinking endlessly at him with the default pistol.

The game can get really frustrating at times due to the programmers making ludicrous amounts of enemies appear in a single area. Even then, the only real difficulty is the last few hand-to-hand combat sequences: the second one in the first Moonrakerlevel is ridiculously fast and also requires the player re-do an entire stealth section if they mess it up. Some of the challenges are also flat-out absurd, such as requiring the player to get kills exclusively using a weapon that only appears halfway through the level in Die Another Day. Even the boss fights are unimpressive, since almost all of them use the hand-to-hand combat system which makes them glorified QTEs. The car sequence in Die Another Day is particularly underwhelming, since rather than being any kind of battle it just consists of locking missiles onto Zao's car until the game decides it's time to knock him into the satellite laser beam.

Aside from Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the other three choices of films are very bizarre and questionable; in particular, not enough nostalgia. Rather than Moonraker, Licence to Kill, and Die Another Day (one of my least favorite films of the entire franchise, alongside The Man with The Golden Gun), more reasonable choices of films for FPS levels might've been The Spy Who Loved Me, The Living Daylights, and You Only Live Twice. Also, despite the locations in the levels looking faithful to their movie counterparts, for some reason they decided to modernize each and every film here, leaving only the basic outlines unchanged, such as Bond wielding a P99 rather than a PPK in Goldfinger (although Goldfinger was set or made in the sixties, and the P99 was developed in the nineties, decades after Goldfinger). In every mission, you are thrown into the scene without any background or info, meaning that you'll have no idea what's going on unless you've watched the movies (like I have seen all the films many times before over the years). However, so many things have changed that even if you have watched the movies, the settings still make very little sense. Additionally, there's some very poor grasp of the source material: for instance, in the Goldfinger mission, you attack an APC with a laser cannon at Fort Knox on foot. But, on the other hand, sometimes the game sticks too closely to the source material, such as requiring Bond to miss Oddjob with his hat, even though Oddjob dies seconds later anyway. Also, the only real gadgets are a cellphone, a "laser" from Bond's watch which can only be used to make noise in stealth sections, and the aforementioned pen gun. Even movie-specific gadgets that would make sense in gameplay like the Signature Gun from Licence to Kill or the wrist-mounted dartgun from Moonraker do not appear.

In addition, every single mission uses Daniel Craig's James Bond model, even though each mission supposedly represents the different actors playing 007 (Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan), so it's kind of a problem when you're celebrating 50 years of James Bond by pretending only one of them existed. On top of that, Daniel Craig was unavailable to voice Bond in this game because he was filming Skyfall at the time, so he is replaced with a lame impersonator.

On a similar note, some of the people they do bring back probably shouldn't have been bought back as they are too old to play their iconic characters again: Carey Lowell is now old enough to be Pam Bouvier's mother, while Michael Lonsdale, reprising his role as Hugo Drax at the age of 81, just sounds like he doesn't really know why he's there. Also, some of the character models in the game are not even close to their movie counterparts, such as Jinx from Die Another Day and Dr. Holly Goodhead from Moonraker. In the former case this is probably because getting the rights to Halle Berry's likeness would increase the budget considerably.

Although the game has multiplayer, it is dull and unimpressive, due to twitchy animation, severe lag and poor map design, even if it was one of the best parts of the game. It's actually quite fun to shoot other people with different Bonds, and works great (at least on the PC version, as multiple issues have been reported on the console versions).

So...THIS was how Activision’s James Bond games ended?!