blood stone |

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Bizarre Creations

Release Date: 11/2/2010

Available On

Most movie-based games are disasters, but when you take a movie license and do something original with it, it can turn out for the better. Bizarre Creations (Blur, Project Gotham Racing) has taken the helm of the Bond license to create the third entry into the series, but this is completely original with no movie tied to it. You play Daniel Craig’s Bond, and you’re, once again, trying to stop some evil thugs from doing evil things. While the story borders on paper-thin, it’s the action that we want.

Since Craig took the spotlight as Bond, his style is more brutal, raw, and realistic instead of the campy, funny, and smooth-talking past Bonds. He’s all about melee, guns, and less gadgets, and whether you like this better is up to you. While Everything or Nothing is the best Bond game in recent memory, Blood Stone is pretty decent. There are car chases, gun battles, and stealth sections that balance out nicely.

The stealth areas consist of sneaking around cover and meleeing guys and shooting them in the head without getting caught, or it’s going to be a firefight. This can be very satisfying when you learn the patrols and execute them accordingly. You can earn Focus Aim by doing a takedown, and this is just a one-shot kill, but you only get three. This comes in handy during stealth sections when you have multiple guys to take down in one area or are in a bind with your health.

Shooting is solid enough with blind fire from cover, and the timing is solid, but all the guns don’t really pack a punch. They feel light and sissy-like and completely not Bondlike at all. There’s a good variety of them, but you won’t care because you can’t tell the difference between any of them! There are some fun set pieces, such as slo-mo sections, some cinematic camera angles when jumping around, and a lot of explosions, so it’s packed full of action.

The racing sequences are something to be desired because it’s just driven from A to B and chasing this guy. There are no attached weapons or anything, and the cars drive like crap half the time. The cars either have severe understeer, oversteer, or feel really floaty. Coming from a developer who specializes in racing games, this is a huge surprise.

The game looks decent, but not up to par with current games. The racing sections look nice, but the characters feel last-gen, and everything just looks meh and sterile. The sound is pretty generic, with pew-pew gunfire, and the voice acting feels stiff despite being from real actors. Blood Stone is a great weekend rental, and don’t even expect multiplayer to keep you interested for much longer.