Dr. K's Waiting Room

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To celebrate the release of the first of many filmic outings for James Bond, October 5^th is officially recognised as “Global James Bond Day”.

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Quick Facts:
After James Bond 007: Blood Stone (Bizarre Creations, 2010) eased the sting of Activision’s poorly received GoldenEye 007 (Rare, 1997) reimagining, Activision were keen to develop a new title to coincide with the franchise’s 50^th anniversary. Built on their pre-existing game engine, 007 Legends saw Daniel Craig lend his likeness to six classic James Bond adventures alongside some returning faces. Sadly, 007 Legends was widely criticised for its repetitive gameplay, awful stealth mechanics, and slapdash narrative. Though the multiplayer options were praised and the game was bolstered by an additional downloadable mission, 007 Legends is largely considered to be one of the worst 007 videogames ever made.

Gameplay and Power-Ups:
007 Legends is an infamous first-person shooter (FPS) in which players revisit truncated and largely reimagined versions of five classic James Bond films – Goldfinger (Hamilton, 1964), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Hunt, 1969), Licence to Kill (Glen, 1989), Die Another Day (Tamahori, 2002), and Moonraker (Gilbert, 1979) – in the guise of the Daniel Craig version of the character, completing anywhere from one to three missions for each. You might be wondering why the films are ordered like that and that’s a great question. The films are presented as flashbacks Bond relives during a near-death experience in Skyfall (Mendes, 2012) and, as such, there’s nothing cohesive linking them together (beyond some recurring characters) and no logic behind presenting Moonraker last except to have a finale in space!! Anyone who’s played Activision’s previous Bond videogames, or the Call of Duty franchise (Various, 2003 to present) will recognise 007 Legends’ control scheme and basic gameplay mechanics, though you can select different presets. By default, players jump and hop vault over low walls with A (though be careful as Bond takes fall damage!), crouch behind cover or to sneak up on enemies with B, reload with X and hold X to interact with the environment (to open doors, activate switches, or hack terminals), and switch weapons with Y (double-tapping it to quickly whip out Bond’s signature Walther P99). The Right Trigger fires while the Right Bumper tosses your primary explosive. The Left Trigger aims down your sights (and offers a partial lock-on when used correctly) and the Left Bumper throws your secondary explosive. You can briefly sprint by pressing in the left stick, perform melee attacks and quick takedowns by pressing in the right stick, and use the directional pad (D-pad) to activate gadgets and add-ons. These apply a silencer to your weapon, whip out Bond’s multi-use dart gun, use his wristwatch as a radar or to disable security cameras, or pull out his smartphone to hack terminals or scan the environment using different filters.

Players can pick between “Modern” or “Classic” health systems, with the former seeing Bond’s health regenerate if he avoids damage for a time and the latter having him collect med-kits and body armour. Bond has an array of weapons (though he can only hold three at a time), with many found in MI6 cases scattered throughout each environment. You can utilise various pistols, from the standard Walther P99 and its variants to the high-impact Iguana .44, close-quarters shotguns like the Camara US6 and super fun Drumhead Type-12, and different sniper rifles (one boasting an infrared filter) for long-range combat. You’ll also grab different Moonraker Laser rifles (which boast infinite ammo), a rocket launcher, various grenades and mines, and a wide assortment of submachine guns and assault rifles. While these are great for thinning out hordes of enemies, many quicky burn through their magazines or are widely inaccurate, though you can compensate for this by purchasing upgrades with experience points (XP). Each weapon and weapon group as an “XP Challenge” tied to it where you’re awarded XP for “eliminating” different numbers of enemies or performing headshots and such. This XP is spent in the XP store to either upgrade Bond’s maximum health, durability, recovery time, sneaking ability, weapon switching and such or on attachments for each weapon class. You can buy bigger magazines, silencers, scopes, stocks, laser sights, a rapid-fire mode and more, however you can only apply three upgrades at a time to each weapon (and to Bond). Bond will also take the controls of a mounted mini gun during On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to mow down Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s minions and can use his dart gun to subdue, shock, or distract enemies. Although largely optional, some areas force you to stealthily avoid enemies or cameras, subduing them with takedowns, your silenced pistol, or your dart gun. This was incredibly aggravating in Licence to Kill, where guards and scientists kept spotting me, but was surprisingly easy in Moonraker. It’s generally beneficial to use stealth when prompted to avoid being set upon by reinforcements and to earn additional XP.

007 Legends quickly establishes its repetitive gameplay loop, tasking you with gunning down various guards or sneaking through areas, liaising with or fighting alongside non-playable characters (NPCs), and exploring various offices. As was the style for Bond videogames, Bond’s smartphone is a key component as you must either photograph evidence or use the camera’s different filters to locate hidden switches (and thereby hidden doors) or analyse objects of interest. You’ll also hack many devices using the phone, holding LT and RT to keep each bar blue or rotating coloured circles to complete a circuit, or rotating segments on Bond’s watch to crack safes. In Moonraker, you must wander through side doors and laboratories, sneaking through ventilation shafts to disable security turrets, while Licence to Kill relies far more on critical stealth sections. You’ll often follow or fight alongside the likes of Felix Leiter and Giacinta Johnson/Jinx and these guys more than hold their own, gunning down guards (occasionally alongside soldiers or marines) and leading you in the right direction. Other times, you must protect your ally, covering Doctor Holly Goodhead or Pam Bouvier as they said you. As far as I could see, these missions only fail if you die or leave the area as your allies seem invulnerable, though I could be wrong. Licence to Kill and Die Another Day offer two driving sections, with you holding RT to accelerate, pressing LT to break, and executing a handbrake turn with A. In Die Another Day, you use the D-pad to activate threat indicators, traction control, and the car’s missile lock-on systems (fired with B). Moonraker’s finale is played entirely in zero gravity, with you flailing about using A and B to ascend or descend and destroying Hugo Drax’s space station turrets. Finally, some enemies and nearly every boss is fought in a janky first-person fist fight sequence that basically amounts to a quick-time event (QTE). You must use the left or right stick, LT and/or RT, or tap A when promptly to land blows, parry, block incoming attacks, and disarm your foes.

Naturally, every mission is loaded with a few objectives, with Bond having to complete more depending on what difficulty you’re playing. Secondary objectives also pop up, earning you additional XP, and your accuracy, completion count, and performance is ranked at the end of each mission for more XP. The onscreen radar and compass guide you towards your primary objective, but secondary ones must be sought out yourself and range from successfully bypassing enemies and cameras without triggering the alarms, analysing samples, destroying Blofeld’s anti-aircraft defences, and taking out Franz Sanchez’s terrorist cronies. You’ll hold X to open doors and plant bombs, analyse nerve gas, download data from terminals, plant tracking devices, gun down enemies, take out snipers, and automatically switch to night vision to explore certain areas. This is most prominent in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where Bond and Marc-Ange Draco explore Blofeld’s maze-like lair to find Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo/Tracy. This mission also begins with a high-speed ski sequence where you frantically dodge trees and rocks and take out Blofeld’s jet-skiing minions and helicopters to catch up to Tracy (easier said than done). Some objectives are timed, such as when you enter serial numbers into terminals in Moonraker to stop Drax launching his poison pods, or when you race into Gustav Graves’ jet, or a nail-biting escape from Drax’s shuttle launch that I barely cleared! Die Another Day starts with you mingling around and investigating Graves’ ice hotel alongside Jinx then taking out his guards in his impressive biodome before dodging lasers from his Icarus satellite and mortars from Zao. Occasionally, players “breach” areas, setting off a slow-motion sequence where you gun down everyone in sight, or you must shoot overhead pipes to dose flames blocking your way. Other times, you can interact with the environment to cause distractions or take out enemies. Some missions take nearly an hour to get through while others last about ten minutes, some rely more on stealth or shooting, and others take your weapons and gadgets away entirely in a desperate attempt to keep things fresh.

Presentation:
007 Legends continues to trend set by GoldenEye 007: Reloaded (Eurocom, 2001) in replacing past Bond actors with Daniel Craig (likeness only here) and having his stoic, no-nonsense Bond relieve classic Bond adventures. Although Timothy Watson does a striking job emulating Craig, his delivery is robotic to the point of apathy, robbing iconic Bond lines like “Do you expect me to talk?” of all their gravitas. All of Bond’s returning villains are modelled after their respective actors (except for Blofeld, who’s modelled after the Donald Pleasance incarnation) as are some of his allies, meaning Michael Lonsdale, Richard Kiel, and Toby Stephens all return alongside the voices and/or likenesses or Carey Lowell, Gert Fröbe, Honor Blackman. Oddly, while Dame Judi Dench, Naomie Harris, Rory Kinnear all return, Jeffrey Wright is recast as Felix Leiter, completely ruining even a slight chance that this game is supposed to fit into Craig’s Bond canon. Bond isn’t seen often but, when he is, he’s little more than a marionette, like his supporting cast. Lacking Halle Berry’s allure and charisma, Jinx is robbed of any memorable characteristics, characters simply go through their motions with little fanfare, and line deliveries are about as disinterested as the soundalike score, which evokes some of the memorable Bond themes but never fully commits to any. The game feels very slapped together, with each mission providing very little context and relying on the player already being familiar with these Bond movies. This might be fine if they didn’t change some elements around, such as Pam infiltrating Sanchez’s organisation in Licence to Kill and ignoring Graves’ true origins in Die Another Day. The flashback bookends and interludes are a cheap way to tie these stories together and I would’ve much preferred that the developers try to rewrite these movies into a cohesive narrative, perhaps using Quantum as a common thread (as the rights to the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion (SPECTRE) were still up in the air at this time).

On the plus side, 007 Legends does as commendable a job as GoldenEye 007: Reloaded at updating and reimagining locations from each movie. Things start off pretty strong, recreating the gold-painted Jill Masterson and dropping Bond outside Auric Goldfinger’s Swiss airbase (which is alive with guards and explosions). Players eventually storm Fort Knox alongside Leiter and some troops, battling down to the vault and encountering the same bomb as in the movie, and eventually confront Goldfinger on his private jet just like in the finale. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service sees you racing down the Swiss Alps and launching an all-out assault on a faithfully recreated version of Blofeld’s mountainside lair, complete with brainwashing bedrooms and underground laboratories. Licence to Kill starts you at the ruins of an Otomi temple, where you stealthily take down guards to infiltrate Sanchez’s elaborate drug operation. This, again, closely mirrors the film but is obviously expanded to incorporate the heavy reliance on stealth in this mission. Licence to Kill ends with you securing a helicopter, chasing Sanchez’s truck on a highway, and even mounting it to take out pursuing Humvees. Die Another Day impressed considerably with its near-identical recreation of Graves’ ice palace, which featured a gaggle of NPCs at the bar, bedrooms and offices, and leads to a man-made jungle environment housed within a high-tech biodome. The laser cutters and ice field Bond drives across even return, as does the finale within Graves’ jet. Moonraker continues this trend, recreating Drax’s ridiculous henchmen and their yellow jumpsuits and seeing Bond sneak through his astronaut training facility, complete with gyrospheres, treadmills, and spare suits. Bond and Dr. Goodhead must escape a launching shuttle’s exhaust flames and sneak aboard another shuttle to board Drax’s space station, where the Earth, other shuttles, and a full-blown laser battle take place in the void outside. This was probably the most visually impressive section, however I did encounter a dramatic and nearly game-breaking period of slowdown during my playthrough. Textures also often warped or popped in out of nowhere, and enemies tended to comically ragdoll when shot.

Enemies and Bosses:
You’ll gun down a small continent’s worth of nameless, faceless, repetitive goons in 007 Legends, each of whom appear slightly different depending on who they’re working for but all follow predictable behaviours. Enemies patrol laboratories, facilities, and areas in a pre-set loop, becoming alerted to your presence if they spot dead bodies or you make too much noise. They call for reinforcements by triggering alarms (which sometimes instantly fails the mission), though you can negate this by disabling overhead cameras or quietly subduing them. Scientists and other NPCs also alert guards if they spot you, costing you the mission or kicking off a gun fight, and enemies are more than capable of taking and firing over cover, opening doors, and climbing ladders to pursue you. If you linger in one spot for too long, enemies toss grenades that can be tricky to avoid, though you can throw your own or blast explosive barrels to take out large groups. Enemies wield machine guns, pistols, and even rocket launchers, firing from afar like the ever-annoying snipers (distinguishable by their laser sights). As you progress, enemies wear more obvious body armour, necessitating the use of more powerful weapons, and they’ll even shred you with mounted guns and hit you if you get close. Occasionally, random guards will surprise you and force a fist fight, often with one or both of you swinging a pole or a wrench or something, which can be annoying as these fights quickly get tedious. Very rarely, enemies will race around in Humvees or on jet skis or attack from helicopters, rappelling down or firing from above and requiring you to blast them from the sky with a rocket launcher. I found Drax’s laser-firing goons particularly difficult to tag in Moonraker thanks to the disorientating zero-gravity, Graves’ suited-up bodyguards were surprisingly durable, and the security turrets will cut you to ribbons unless you disable them.

Any time an enemy forces a fist fight, this essentially counts as a mini boss, I guess, or a reminder of the clunky fighting mechanics for the real bosses. In Goldfinger, this means throwing hands with Goldfinger’s stout, mute bodyguard/assassin, Oddjob. Just like in the movie, you swing a pole at Oddjob and must dodge his razor-sharp hat (which instantly kills if you don’t react to the QTE fast enough). Like every fist fight, though, it’s a simple affair made even easier as Bond finishes Oddjob in a cutscene, though you must remember to hit LT to send Goldfinger packing. After cutting down Blofeld’s soldiers and beating up his goons hidden throughout his lair, you’ll get into a fist fight with SPECTRE’s head honcho in a cable car. Blofeld throws hands and an axe, which you must parry and then take from him, but it’s the same fight you have every time, just dragged out more. Similarly, after making it through aggravating critical stealth sections in Sanchez’s drug lab, you fight his sadistic right-hand, Dario, who swings a pole and ends up falling into the machinery. You must then succeed a QTE on Sanchez’s tanker truck and fist fight him, too, parrying his machete when prompted. Die Another Day mixes things up by having you race from and then fire missiles at Zao across the ice, dodging his mortars and Icarus lasers. Though the mission again ends in a fist fight, Graves is at least wearing his ridiculous cybernetic suit and you must complete a few more QTEs to dodge his electrical blasts. Moonraker not only employs aggravating critical stealth sections but has you circumventing and disabling overhead turrets to infiltrate Drax’s operation, where you’re naturally attacked by Jaws. You must tap A to avoid being bitten, tap RT to toss a screwdriver at him to save Dr. Goodhead, bash his head with a metal pole, and finally hit RT to electrocute him. When pursuing Drax, Bond must float around destroying six mechanical arms to stop his poison pods launching, which is tricky because of his disorientating zero-gravity is, the enemies firing at you, and the small window you have to attack the arms. You can destroy the pods as well, but the gas will chip away at your health, and this is basically it as Drax is finished in a cutscene.

Additional Features:
There are fifty Achievements in 007 Legends and most of them are pretty easy to obtain, meaning this is the only real reason to play the game. You’ll get an Achievement for finishing each movie and two for finishing on “Agent” difficulty or higher or using “Classic” mode. You get another Achievement for fully upgrading one weapon, gadget, and buying all of Bond’s health and gameplay buffs, another for earning 10,000 XP, and another for scoring “eliminations” with every weapon class. There’s a bullshit but also amusing 0G Achievement, another for photographing Graves’ alligator and completing the Die Another Day driving section without gadgets, and another for sending Drax’s gyrosphere haywire. Every location has intel and biographical items hidden in it, usually in the bad guy’s office, which you must collect for additional Achievements and to unlock character bios and models. You can also view concept and production art, input cheat codes (mostly to unlock multiplayer extras), and tackle various “trials” for each mission and difficulty. These task you with having high accuracy, finishing each mission in a set time, utilising stealth, and amassing certain “eliminations” for a higher score, more XP, and a handful of Achievements. Similarly, you can take on the “Challenge” mode to revisit missions with less resources or certain restrictions in place. 007 Legends also offers local multiplayer (I assume the online functionality is long gone), featuring additional classic characters and some familiar gameplay modes, such as a free-for-all, capture the flag, team-based gameplay, limiting your lives, or offering more points for using the fabled Golden Gun. Though no longer available, there was also an extremely short, downloadable Skyfall mission (that had no new Achievements) that saw you pursuing the Patrice on a motorcycle (in first-person, no less) across the rooftops and through the streets and buildings of Istanbul, tracking the assassin to a skyscraper, and using cover to engage in a shoot-out against his sniping skills rather than offering another fist fight.

Final Thoughts:
I’d heard all about how bad 007 Legends was and, having been disappointed by Activision’s previous James Bond videogames, I was very reluctant to try it for myself, especially as it’s priced too high for its reputation and the Skyfall mission is now lost media. However, I finally relented, reasoning that the Achievements would be worth my time and it couldn’t be all that bad. Truthfully, it’s really not that terrible; it just continues the trend of these games being painfully repetitive and generic. It lacks the excitement and fun of Bond’s classic Nintendo 64 outing, fails to stand up to the celebrated (if equally uninspired) Call of Duty franchise, and, worst of all, doesn’t do anything interesting with the license. Recreating classic Bond movies was a great idea, but presenting them as disconnected, truncated flashbacks suffered by Craig’s Bond robs them of all context. While there’s some impressive attention to detail at times and fun little Easter Eggs dotted about, this is a cheap, clearly rushed celebration of the franchise that doesn’t even include an end cutscene! The shoot outs are quite fun, for the most part, but dulled considerably by the tedious hacking mini games and boring fist fight mechanics that reduce every boss to a painfully easy and tiresome slugfest. The stealth sections are even worse, raising the alarm and costing you the mission at even the slightest hint of your presence, and the pacing is all over the place, with some missions taking ages to finish and having multiple sections and others being over in the blink of an eye. The upgrade system is alright, I guess, but somewhat redundant given you can recover health, but it doesn’t take long to get everything you need. I don’t know if paying for the likenesses or the other Bond actors would’ve salvaged 007 Legends but it’s certainly a disappointing, half-assed, and forgettable experience that’s really only worth it to say you tried it and agree with the general consensus…and to add to your Gamer Score.

My Rating:

Could Be Better

Do you agree that 007 Legends is one of the worst James Bond videogames? What did you think to the movies selected for the title? How do you think it holds up compared to other Bond games from this time? Did you also struggle with the critical stealth sections? What did you think to the hacking mini games and repetitive fist fights? Did you ever play the Skyfall mission? What’s your favourite James Bond game and how are you celebrating the character this month? Whatever you think about 007 Legends, please share your thoughts in the comments, check out my other James Bond content, and suggest a Bond movie or videogame for me to review by donating to my Ko-Fi.