James Bond 007: Blood Stone Review

007 finally returns, however, instead of opting for the silver screen, Bond jumps into our TVs as Bizarre Creations brings us James Bond 007: Blood Stone. Featuring the current incarnation of Bond (Daniel Craig) and the current head of MI5 (Dame Judy Dench), along with a bonafide Bond screenwriter (Bruce Feirstein) and finally Joss Stone who performed the opening theme in addition of voicing the obligatory love interest, it would seem that Bizarre Creations and Activision are taking the franchise very seriously. Giving the game the same feel as the film based Bond movies which Daniel Craig has featured in, the atmosphere is dark and gritty, focusing upon realism rather than the gadget based hijinx of previous outings.

The game flows just like how a typical Bond movie would: the opening action sequence has M giving Bond an order to stop something terrible happening followed by Bond jumping out of the back of an aeroplane to perform some skydiving acrobatics onto the deck of a ship. After some 3rd person shooting and stealth takedowns it then cuts to a driving section, which sadly is the better part of this game, to then showing M being as smug as ever as she knew that Bond would get the job done. After all this you then get the obligatory trippy Bond intro sequence and title theme song.

As we've just stated, the driving sections in this game outshine the core shooting sections which is a sad state of affairs as the driving sections are meant to be transition segments rather than the focus of the game. Though viewing the back catalogue of Bizarre Creations, you can understand why these driving segments are as slick as they are due to the developers pedigree in the racing genre.

Now we're not necessarily putting down the 3rd person shooter part of this game as to be fair it does an admirable job of putting you into the shoes of Bond, it's just a few niggles that takes from the illusion of being a super spy.

Firstly it seems that Bond is unable to suffer from the effects of recoil as on numerous occasions I've been able to pop out of cover, fire off a single round and score a headshot, no matter what weapon I was using at the time. There is definitely a heavy sense of auto aim helping you out on this front.

Secondly, it seems that the modelling team at Bizarre had an awful job trying to recreate Daniel Craig's features as in all honesty he's one step away from being a Klingon. As this is our protagonist, you have the unfortunate position of having to look upon his grizzly face all through the game.
Additionally the campaign will probably take the average gamer around 5-6 hours to complete which may seem a tad short for those wanting more of a Bond fix.

On the plus side, the story to this adventure is pretty solid, megalomaniac billionaires with a slice of international terrorism building biochemical weapons after vital research data was stolen. It's pretty gripping stuff though I feel it would have been better translated on the silver screen rather than having the player act out this episode.

The various locations that you get to visit do look rather wonderful, the npc models look realistic and move smoothly, the car models are very authentic, again down to Bizarre's racing genre pedigree, and on the whole the game does look very pleasing to the eye indeed.

The multiplayer mode of this game is a tad hit and miss, while TDM is fun and Last Man Standing a frantic blast, the objective attack/defend mode can feel a little stale at times, also the multiplayer element to this title feels like an afterthought to the game and could have had the potential to be something special indeed if a little more time was placed into the modes.

Overall James Bond 007: Blood Stone has a great story line but is let down by the average shooter at its core. While we may not see another Bond film on the movie screens, you would be better off just watching the cut-scenes on Youtube and buying Goldeneye on the Wii.