Quantum of Solace
We haven’t played a decent James Bond shoot ’em up since GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 in 1997. Can the ‘Call of Duty 3’ guys rekindle some of the magic?
As first-person shooters go, Quantum of Solace for Xbox 360 does just about better than okay. It has cool weapons and ammo including a sniper rifle and Walther PPK. It adds some half-decent Close Quarters Combat moves. You can blow up stuff like cars, oh and crates marked ‘EXPLOSIVES’. The multiplayer modes, any first-person shooter’s live or (let) die, are fun – especially one entitled ‘Man with the Golden Gun’. But while it’s handy to have names like that adding a spec of 00 glamour, elsewhere in Quantum of Solace: The Game you quickly forget that this is James Bond and not just another Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six.
We recently took a couple of hours to play through Casino Royale sections – we weren’t allowed to spy the Quantum of Solace areas, by PR decree. Our exploits took place on the train to Montenegro, and later a trip to the museum. In Casino Royale neither scenes involved gunfights versus an army of terrorists, but somehow in the videogame this is the kind of thing that takes centre stage. “Sorry… err, Vesper, I’ve got to nip out and shoot some lads who are trying to hijack the train”. Remember that part? Us neither.
Now Treyarch (Call of Duty 3) are proven pros at staging heart-in-mouth cinematic shooters. Their past efforts have laid out memorable set-piece scenarios against the backdrop of World War II. Treyarch cannot be blamed for assigning Bond to a similarly cacophonic series of missions involving lots of shooting and little else. This we may not have a problem with were it not for the trumpeting of the marketing material claiming that Bond would be the master of his environment, and use his cunning to teach bad guys a lesson rather than always rocking out all guns blazing.
Although a race against time to prevent your carriage from being uncoupled by marauding mercenaries is fun, in addition to confined gunplay within the buffet car, this really could be anyone’s gig. It doesn’t need to be Bond. Indeed, because Bond invariably handles situations on his own, you lose the strategic complexity of commanding a small team as has become common in most FPS games after the first Rainbow Six on Xbox and PC. Given this, and our rooftop moving onto car park scuffles against improbably armed and well trained Museum security, we saw little sign of anything more subtle and characteristically James Bond. Not one cool gadget, just a set of guns to play with. No sneaking. No precarious clambering around. Just bang-bang you’re dead. Since this is Bond we were just hoping for something more.
Given that the FPS element is fairly solid, it wasn’t so much of a surprise to find that the multiplayer modes are more fun albeit further distanced from trademark Bond. The mode of choice, as mentioned earlier, was Man with the Golden Gun, in which the player who snatched said pistol took charge of a gleaming super weapon with surprisingly devastating results despite its tiny proportions. We chased each other across ceramic-tiled rooftops. Ran up and down stairs in a millionaire’s mansion. Hid behind fences. Peaked over window ledges, avoided grenades, attempted a few headshots. The usual. It was fun for a while.
Had Bond premiered like this upon the arrival of the current super consoles we might've had more to celebrate. Its 'next-gen' looks are spectacular in all the right places, there must've been a huge art team employed to lavish so much detail on the environments. Sadly the gameplay just isn't Bond enough to itself above so many similar first-person shooters available for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
We hope, given full access to all this game has to offer, that more surprises are in store.
