Twelve for 2012: Video Games Part Five – 007 Legends

By Louis Rabinowitz on Tuesday, July 17th, 2012

It’s time for part five – the one with the secret agent(s), the helicopters spinning out of control and the usual massive amount of globe-trotting. Part five, 007 Legends!

Release date: October 16

Platform(s): Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Microsoft Windows PC

THE GOOD STUFF

It’s something that the Bond fandom has been crying out for: a game, tying together six different James Bond movies (each from a different era) in six missions – which we know include Moonraker, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and latest outing Skyfall in an over-arching storyline that will somehow make six completely different stories fit together canonically, with Daniel Craig playing James Bond in each mission. Okay, I lie, I don’t think many people have entertained the prospect of 007 Legends, but the point still stands – it’s a bit of a treat for Bond fans, with the 50th anniversary coming up. And Skyfall, of course.

It’s an original idea, at least – not following the accepted standard of ‘Can we remake GoldenEye one last time?’, that’s characterized the James Bond video games franchise, since… well, since GoldenEye. Most Bond films have never seen video game adaptations, and while I’m not suggesting they trawl through the Bond series, making video games of each movie (God, that would suck. Every final boss would be almost the same), but it’s nice to see that some of the better (well, better on paper. Was Moonraker really the best you could do, Activision? Why not Goldfinger or something?) movies in the franchise are getting the video game treatment, complete with Daniel Craig.

The online multiplayer, a staple of the first-person shooter genre, looks pretty impressive, with the usual local four-player split-screen matches and online leaderboards for the six missions of the single player campaign, and a selection of weapons, maps and characters cherry-picked from the James Bond movies (I want the volcano base from You Only Live Twice pop up as a map. Make it, Activision!) for the online multiplayer. It’s not going to be Call of Duty’s superb multiplayer, but it should definitely be quite a lot of fun to play.

THE BAD STUFF

There’s a bit of a cheap tie-in game look so far for the game. Remember, despite the extra missions from throughout Bond’s history, this has still been released just before Skyfall for a reason. And while the prospect of six missions from assorted Bond movies is exciting, it just feels a bit uninspired right now. We’ll have to wait and see to find out what the plot that ties all six missions together actually is to fully judge this, but at this particular point in time, it looks like Activision, instead of creating new and exciting James Bond storylines, have nicked six plots and hammered them all together with virtual wet cement (God knows what THAT looks like). Where’s the originality, Activision?

It’s an FPS, releasing at the start of FPS season. And I mean what will most likely be better first-person shooters – Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Halo 4 (although Halo 4‘s shifting away from its first-person shooter origins in favour of suspense and adventure) and, of course, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. With the three biggest first-person shooter franchises of all time all releasing within a month of 007 Legends (its main rival will be Warfighter, which arrives the following week), there’s a very real danger that it could end up washing up on the desert beach of video gaming that I mentioned yesterday, unloved and almost completely ignored.

Will it be good?

It should be, but I’m reserving my final judgement on this until we get to see all six mission trailers, a synopsis of the over-arching storyline and some proper gameplay, but I’ll say this: if I had to say yes or no now, I’d say yes, just about.

Will it succeed?

Probably not. It’s being released in a tricky season for video games, where triple-A games are being released faster than most reviewers and critics can review them, and it doesn’t really have the stand-out quality a game needs to succeed in video games season.