Ladies and Gentleman – Mr Sean Connery (Applause)…
The master of a hundred accents (every one of them Scottish) is back in the role of Bond - James Bond. It’s actually a rather bizarre experience – here a 75 year-old Connery plays himself in the game of a movie from 1963. The problem is whilst the Bond of the game looks like he did in the early 60s he sounds like a septuagenarian trying to be 33. I’m unsure if it’s intentional but Sean almost seems to be trying to impersonate himself as he sounded all those years ago – personally I would have preferred him to stick with the grizzled John Mason voice from “The Rock”.
The early Bond movies are, quite rightly, regarded as “classics” – yes they had all the staple Bond moments – gadgets, girls, people known by nothing my single letters and organisations known my clever acronyms. However (and maybe I never paid that much attention) they did not have a body count to rival the battles from all three Lord of the Rings movies (the extended ones at that).
From Russia with Love is a very strange choice for a Bond game – there is talk of it being Connery’s favourite of the series and the developers liked the locations – however I can’t help but they thinking along the lines of “What was the movie with the Jet Pack?”
For the want of a better way of describing the game – this is a lot like “Everything or Nothing” (the last decent Bond game) but just not as good. It somehow feels wrong to be running around as a young Connery firing off more rounds than the British Army has discharged this year. It’s a very linear experience – even the level set in a maze has no wrong turns. Everything is laid out for you – move from A to B shooting as many bad guys as you can. It gets boring very quickly.
Nothing about the game really seems to work. It’s as if EA got the licence to use Mr Connery’s image and voice but instead of coming up with a game worthy of the great man they wasted it on this. It’s a 1960s movie for a generation of gamers who don’t know that Halle Berry was NOT the first Bond girl to walk out of the ocean in a Bikini. This is proved in the very first mission where the iconic jetpack is turns Bond into a rocket launching, helicopter dodging, dinner jacket-wearing super hero. The multiplayer mode is also daft and poorly implemented, a simplistic, frantic and rather brainless runaround that you’ll only live through once, or maybe twice…
There really never seems to be any point to the game – if you want a good Bond game then go buy EoN – if you want a good Connery fix go buy “The Rock” on DVD – both together should work out cheaper than this. A very wasted effort.
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