Reviewed: November 6, 2008
Reviewed by: Roger Cox

Publisher
Activision

Developer
Beenox

Released: November 4, 2008
Genre: Action
Players: 1-12

6
6
8
8
7.0

System Requirements:

What is your perception of what a Bond game should be? Should it be a run and gun shooter like GoldenEye was or should it play more like a Metal Gear Solid game where you are sneaking around and hacking into stuff? These are the critical questions you need to ask yourself before playing Quantum of Solace or you might be disappointed.

Quantum of Solace was built using the amazing Call of Duty 4 engine and seeing as it was developed by Treyarch (Call of Duty: World at War) this is a fast paced FPS that only slows down when the difficulty is amped up.

Quantum of Solace’s story starts you off right where Casino Royale ended, although you spend the majority of the game playing through the Casino Royale story that has been cut and pasted. The game’s story doesn’t fit together very well and more than likely you will have a hard time following the plot. Who cares about a plot when you have awesome gameplay right?

After blowing through a few levels with ease as a Field Operative, I decided to make things more challenging by selecting Agent mode. This slowed down the pace of the game and essentially put the game on a “normal” setting. Don’t try New Recruit unless you happen to be a FPS rookie, otherwise you will find the difficulty is nearly nonexistent.

The controls are nearly identical to Call of Duty 4 with the only real difference being wall-hugging. You must press “E” to hug a wall or object. It works well for the most part until an enemy decides to run behind you and you are unable to swing your character 180 degrees around to kill them. This creates a real problem because you have to cancel the wall-hug to kill the guy who is shooting at you from behind. Doing that is a death sentence because the other enemies (originally in front of you) are now killing you from behind. So if an enemy runs behind (while wall-hugging) you are essentially caught in a fatal crossfire that is nearly impossible to escape.

You are probably wondering why I didn’t just try crouching behind the object I was originally wall-hugging. I did, but enemies can easily shoot you when you aren’t hugging a wall, even if you “appear” to have the same amount of cover. If you are wall-hugging and someone throws a grenade near you Bond will stand up and be completely vulnerable to attacks.

This problem makes the game hard to play on Agent and nearly impossible on 007 mode. It happens pretty often and it is enough to infuriate you on the higher difficulty settings. Luckily the checkpoint system is as good as Call of Duty and you won’t have to worry about a lot of repetition.

The graphics are odd; they get better as you progress through the game, but they fall short of being great or even good. The textures are plain and flat, even in later missions when the lighting gives some objects the “appearance” of being bump-mapped and what's up with that water in Venice?

For a full price game this fall I would have expected Bond to look his sharpest, but instead he has been forced to blend in with the everyday first person shooter. Cutscenes are the worst I have seen on a PC game in at least two years. They are extremely washed out and fuzzy like MPEG quality. Treyarch and Beenox (the company that ported the game to PC) would have been better off using the in game graphics instead of doing a terrible job with the CG cutscenes which look like they used the games graphics engine to create, but then recorded and compressed them for playback. Trust me when I say they only look slightly better on the Xbox 360.

Later in the game there are some nice rain reflections and dust effects, but nothing that you haven’t seen before. It might be useful to know that I ran this game on the highest settings and at 1900x1200. Graphically speaking, there is nothing new or original about Bond. Thankfully, the sound is really good. The team did a nice job rounding up all the original movie actors to do the entire script for the game and they did a great job portraying their movie characters.

One of the most engaging parts about a James Bond game is the welcome and customary classic Bond music that accompanies every movie. Old and current music have been used throughout the game, which really helps draw you in as the bond character. There is plenty of excellent sound in the cutscenes and gameplay, both direct sound effects and ambient environmental noies. Lots of cool (fake) computer noises beeping and clicking really make you feel like you are in a high-tech bond game/movie. The guns sound just as they should, powerful and realistic.

Bond’s value as a solo game is fair but gets a nudge from the online game modes. The multiplayer options like “man with the golden gun” and “team death match” are enjoyable enough to keep people playing for a long time. There isn’t a level-up system like Call of Duty, but that doesn’t matter to a lot of FPS fans. Hopefully more people will buy this game so it won’t be so hard for me to find people to play with on live. The multiplayer level designs are creative and fun. Most of the time people (or teams) are fighting for position on the highest ledge. While the cover system in multiplayer is useful, I found myself dying a lot because of the people that didn’t use it. That being said, there is a price to be paid for wall-hugging.

There are other multiplayer modes such as classic deathmatch, Bond Versus, and Bond Evasion. Deathmatch is pretty standard while Bond Versus has one player taking the role of James Bond while facing a gang of henchmen (other players) controlled by the evil organization (think 1 vs. 5). Bond Evasion has one player from the MI-6 team play as Bond and it is the team’s goal to get him to a marked location before the team of henchmen kills him.

The single player campaign feels like it’s going to be lengthy, but in reality it ends up being short depending on what difficulty you select. Playing the game through the first time on the third hardest difficulty will take you an estimated 6-8 hours while playing it on the easiest should only take you 4-5. The only real incentive for replaying the story would be to obtain all the achievements and many of those seem rather gimmicky and forced upon you.

Overall, Quantum of Solace is a decent FPS, but one that fails to live up to Treyarch’s reputation. Although I had fun playing, I never got the urge to revisit Bond when I wasn’t. The graphics are merely average, sound is good, and the gameplay is repetitious and even annoying at times. It is sad that there is such a lack of originality, especially considering the possibilities.

007: Quantum of Solace was supposed to be the game that got the James Bond franchise out of its slump, but instead it succumbs to its own mediocrity and will only satisfy those with the lowest of expectations.