The Bond franchise should make it really easy to create great games, a kick ass spy that has gadgets, always gets the girl (or girls) and cars that most of us can only dream of owning. But sadly the quality of the games is often found lacking, EA held the reins of the franchise until very recently and now that Activision have the license to create Bond titles they are launching their first game along side the release of the movie.
The style of Quantum of Solace is very similar to that found in Bourne Conspiracy but to my delight I found that it’s focus was less centred on hand to hand buttonmashing and more about shooting people in the back and silent take downs. The game takes place for the majority in a third person view, the CoD4 engine has been modified amongst other things to allow this, when you zoom in with a weapon the view changes to first person. There is a cover mechanic, which works well, you can lean out to blind fire, you can climb over cover or just hide until a guard passes if you are taking the sneaky route.
There is the option to take people down with out guns, you can sneak up on people and do a stealth take down to allow an quiet passage through a level, or if you can manage getting close enough to an enemy aware of your presence, without getting pumped full of lead, you can take them out with a stylish melee attack triggered by pushing in the left hand thumbstick and following a single button prompt (that changes each time)
I was able to play the Sienna roof-top level where Bond is chasing someone that is setting bombs along the path of combat, you are not able to kill this person (interrogation maybe?) but he does have henchmen that you get to shoot while in chase. A lot of the locations from the first and second movies are present in the game, Treyarch worked very closely with the movie production team to capture the look and feel of the environments. Over and above the relevance of the environments is the fact that they actually look very nice. There promises to be a nice amount of variation in the different levels, even the two that we played were very unique with one being based in the Casino Royale and the other the Sienna Rooftop Mission, even within the roof top mission there is a nice change from underground to street level then again moving up a level to the rooftops.
While playing the main complaint I had was the button layout, with a game that has actions so similar to third/first person shooter, it seemed strange to have buttons mapped so differently, especially when the games engine is based on one of the most familiar setups’ around. a carbon copy of the Call of Duty with one or two small changes to allow for cover would make for an immediate comfort level for many gamers. As it was there were two ways to run something that seems redundant.
Overall for a movie tie in it comes of as a very polished experience, very competent fighting mechanics, and other than the slightly strange controller layout I think a solid title. I look forward to trying out the full game along with its multiplayer component.
