007 Legends Review

Two years ago Eurocom brought the classic GoldenEye game into the high-definition era with GoldenEye 007 and it was pretty damn good. It was a proper remake with a decent multiplayer addition. Well now it’s been two years and Eurocom is taking a shot at something that isn’t a remake, but after playing through 007 Legends I’m left thinking that maybe they should stick with remaking games instead of coming up with original ones.

007 Legends
Developer: Eurocom
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS3 (reviewed), Wii-U, Xbox 360
A PS3 copy of 007 Legends was supplied to us

So the game was clearly designed as a tribute to the Bond films by starting out with the intro to Skyfall when James Bond is shot and falls off a train into the water when he begins to recall his previous adventures. We’re given five missions, each from a film from the five classic Bond actors so we get Goldfinger (Connery), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Lazenby), Licence to Kill (Dalton), Die Another Day (Brosnan), and the game ends with Moonraker (Moore). I could go on about how their film choices for all the actors (besides Lazenby of course) are odd since there are infinitely better films by each actor, but I’ll just leave it at that and let Goldfinger get a pass. Perhaps Eurocom knows something I don’t regarding the James Bond license, or perhaps they just have shit taste in Bond films. Of course, Daniel Craig’s face replaces everyone in each movie for obvious consistency which was to be expected. All of the missions also get a modern touch since it would be weird for Craig to be using a smartphone in a film that took place in the time these films take place. Now I hope you saw all of these movies because this game assumes you know everything about these five films. You won’t get a proper beginning, middle, or end for any of these missions and you’ll instead be thrown into random parts of the movie (usually the most climactic). For example, O.H.M.S.S. starts out with Bond and Tracy talking before a ski gun battle occurs, once you reach the bottom of the mountain the game will instantly cut to Bond’s assault on Blofeld’s mountain base which continues until you fight Blofeld on the ski lift and it ends right when he dies. Somebody could easily be confused by this since they would have no clue who Tracy is, who Blofeld is and what he’s doing, and who Marc-Ange Draco is. The same formula applies to the other four missions and I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t seen the movies could enjoy the single-player. It’s understandable that many people probably haven’t seen most of these films since there are 22 movies in the franchise and Eurocom should have accounted for this. Hell, I saw all of these movies and it still left a bad taste in my mouth. Oh yea, and the game abruptly ends with Moonraker since the Skyfall mission won’t release until the release of the movie (Nov.9th for PS3, Nov.20th for Xbox) to avoid spoilers I suppose. At least it’s going to be free.

So each mission opens up with “Hey Bond infiltrate this place” and once you’ve infiltrated it you’ll get the brilliant objective of “Hey infiltrate it further” and if you repeat that in your head a couple dozen times you’ll have every interaction with M in the game and the basic gist of each objective. The game should last you no more than 5 hours since each mission can be completed in around 30 minutes, more if you’re going slow, and you’ll be glad when it’s over. You’ll go through boring shootout after boring shootout which left me wondering why somebody who made a shooter forgot to make the part you do the entire game, the shooting, fun. There is an upgrade feature where you can earn XP from doing various XP challenges or just by completing objectives that can be used to unlock attachments for your guns or a few perks. These are just your basic things like red dot or ACOG scopes and the perks do things like giving you faster reload speeds or faster health regeneration. These are things put there to make an already easy game even easier. You’ll also get a smartphone, wristwatch, and dart pen. The pen has a shock, tranquilizer, and distraction mode while the wristwatch can be used to locate enemies or cause distractions. The phone on the other hand is never used in combat and is only used for the occasional picture taking, hacking, or fingerprint scanning. I figured you could do something like hack security cameras to turn them off or hacking the alarms so enemies can’t summon reinforcements but I guess I have better ideas than the people paid to work on this game since the game is 95% shooting and 5% horrible stealth segments.

So somebody decided to give the finger to interesting boss fights and opted to turn each boss into a QTE. It’s not even the QTE where you tap a button and quickly get the experience over with, you have to flick the left and right stick either up or down to aim punches to the body part that the boss isn’t guarding. It seemed interesting at first until I realized that it doesn’t get fun. I can’t think of any way you could fail these moments unless you had the reaction time of a rock and the boss won’t hit back unless you accidentally flick the stick in another direction. There are some moments when the game removes the button prompts and you can actually dodge enemy attacks while swinging a weapon at them, but these parts are quickly ended by just spamming attacks and taking the occasional hit. Trust me, you won’t die. The fight against Goldfinger was so forgettable I actually forgot I fought him a few hours after I finished that mission. It’s just an insult to both gaming and more importantly to the James Bond franchise to end these fights with the exact same laughably bad QTE that just ends up feeling cheap and lazy.

The enemies feel more like bullet sponges in my way than actual enemies. The AI is laughably bad with enemy soldiers repeatedly running away from you into walls or stuck on furniture and firing at you while running. It’s also hilarious how you can just run right up in their faces and perform the cinematic melee attack which will not only recharge your health during the animation, but you’re invulnerable during it too. There’s also a weird occurrence where enemies seemed to just run up to me whenever I got close enough to do this move which would make chaining punches pathetically simple. You’d think they’d run off to take cover from the guy who’s charging them with nothing but a laser watch. The game is pathetically easy though and Bond can take quite a lot of hits especially if you equip the health perks. Unfortunately if you ever decide to get a taste of what death feels like you’ll be greeted with a 30 second loading screen giving you helpful tips such as “A shotgun is ideal at close range”.

My biggest gripe with the game is probably how the game gives you these stealth gadgets yet the stealth segments are easily some of the worst designed parts of the game. There’s no way to survey the area properly or even peep around corners so you’re forced to have to pop out in the open to get a lay of the land. Enemies will also walk in spots that makes taking them out without having their buddies see their dead body almost impossible. It doesn’t help that you can’t pick up bodies to move them. I found the best stealth tactic is just running from enemy to enemy punching them in the face. What’s the point in giving me all these interesting darts, the wristwatch, or the phone if I’m never going to get to use them to actually sneak? It’s easier to just shoot your way through these areas except for when the game decides to just give you a mandatory stealth area “just because”. These areas are hilarious since they don’t give you any reason why alerting the enemies would be bad since you probably shot up the room before that and you’re most definitely going to shoot up the room right after it.

The game takes a page out of Modern Warfare 2’s Spec-Ops mode by including a series of single-player only challenge based missions cleverly titled Mi6 Ops. You’ll do things like start out unarmed and have to simply escape, defend areas, or just shoot shit; actually most of them involve shooting shit. My favorite is the escape type since it doesn’t matter if you have every NPC in the area shooting at you at full alert status, you can still nail a perfect score as long as you don’t kill anyone and make it to the end. The only neat thing about this mode is that you can adjust various things like your health, enemy health, enemy accuracy, your HUD, and a few others. This will lower or raise the difficulty and the higher it is the more XP you’re awarded at the end of the mission to use in the single-player. The poor man’s Call of Duty multiplayer is back from GoldenEye as well. Two years ago it was excusable since they were remaking an entire game and adding stuff to it, now it feels more dated than it did years ago. It’s got your typical multiplayer modes and most of the modes return from GoldenEye so if you really liked that then you’re in for a treat since this is pretty much the same besides a few changes.

The graphics just look like total ass and it doesn’t seem like it’s any better looking than Goldeneye 007. You’d think a company working under Activision and aping on the Call of Duty titles would be allowed to borrow the IW Engine to pretty up their game. The voice acting is also pretty half assed since the Daniel Craig impersonator seems to only know how to do a serious Craig voice and all the other characters just have their lines ripped straight from the films besides the few people they needed to replace.

The Final Word
This was supposed to hype fans up for Skyfall and be a part of the 50th anniversary celebration, instead it puts a stain on a series I cherish deeply. Everything is just poorly done and with the multiplayer being the only decent thing out of it I still can’t recommend picking up this game with Halo 4 and Black Ops 2 on the horizon. Eurocom ended up putting together a pathetic singleplayer with a decent (although unmemorable) multiplayer mode which surprises me since I really enjoyed their Goldeneye remake.

– MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre