quantum of solace |

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Treyarch

Release Date: 11/4/2008

Available On

Well, here we are again sitting around the Bond fire (LAWL!), but seriously, who still likes James Bond after five different actors and twenty different movies? Does Bond ever age? Does he ever get a vacation without it turning into a firefight? How many mysterious foreign chicks does he need to bang before he realizes he should retire and get married already? Seriously, no one will be as good as Sean Connery, and Daniel Craig can’t even pull off Bond to save his life. This dude is a serious joke, but thankfully you won’t even care when you play this stupid yet fun game. This is one of those sleeper hits that has a retarded story and gameplay, yet you still finish the whole thing because it’s just stupid fun. Kind of like bathroom jokes; they don’t do any harm or good, yet they are still fun to say and laugh about over and over again. Quantum of Solace is like the bathroom joke of a sleeper hit FPS; you have your basic follow-up, and the punchline is what keeps you laughing. While you can completely forget about the retarded story about Bond and some terrorist dudes who are doing this and that I have no freaking clue and I don’t care, Daniel Craig has bits of his voice in the game, and his model has one expression that never seems to change.

While this game is seriously flawed, there are a lot of good things to keep you playing (rent it only!). The game looks really good; while not superb, it can pass off as an above-average next-gen game, which is a plus. Secondly, the game has super awesome guns, and they all feel really powerful. While they have more acronyms than a NASA space launch, you have your pistols, silenced pistols, submachine guns, sniper rifles, etc. While they aren’t anything new, they look cool, feel powerful, and sound cool, and they all go BOOM! You also have grenades, which are kind of retarded since you only get to carry one grenade at a time! The game actually has a semi-useful cover system that is both great and flawed at the same time. While you can sprint around and stuff, you can hit A to dash into cover (think Gears of War), and you have your typical blind firing and all that covering crap. The flawed part is that when you get hit by a grenade, you suddenly stand up. If you aim too far to your sides, Bond tends to stick his head out, and you can easily get killed this way.

Basically, the gunplay is your typical standard FPS stuff with retarded AI to boot. You’ll have swarms of guys coming after you, and they just stand there and let you blow them apart. Speaking of blowing apart, the game has an “environmental damage” system where you can shoot flashing objects to damage enemies (like we haven’t seen that before!). This actually does help when you have seven guys under a wooden platform full of explosive barrels. Shooting those support beams is just oh-so-awesome. The game is full of adrenaline-pumping sequences like your OMG!! button-pressing cutscenes (which are actually fun), and this is where you really feel like Bond, so that’s always a plus on the cinematic side. Since this is a Bond game, you can use stealth in a lot of the levels, but it’s very shallow and not implemented well. It really feels like an old PlayStation or an N64 game where you just hide behind a wall, dodge this camera’s spotlight, disable that camera, and shoot that guard. The cameras don’t even notice when you pop some lead into a guy’s head right in the camera’s view. I don’t know what the developers were trying to prove except for the fact that using old mechanics in 2008 doesn’t work too well.

A lot of times you’ll not know what to do, and you’ll blow your cover due to trial and error (again, a 10-year-old thing), and you have to restart all over again (if you want to stay stealthy). So, you can sneak around, but it feels really old and doesn’t really work out too well. Of course, you have to have some Bond moves to perform, and this is done by pressing the L stick and pushing the on-screen button and watching a 2-3 hit instant kill! While this is cool, the animations get repetitive. When the camera pulls back into first-person mode, you get disoriented since sometimes the game will flip you around, and it’s too easy to do. It’s cool sneaking up behind a guy and pulling off a Bond movie, but after about twenty times, you’ll get sick of it. Another thing I didn’t like was that there were no driving sequences. What’s a Bond game with no driving?! There is, however, a cool train sequence that is pretty cool, with you decoupling cars, jumping from decoupled cars, and just all that cool Bond stuff. While that’s the basic gameplay, you can see there is a lot missing that should have been in here.

With the mechanics feeling about 10 years old, this really drags the experience down, and after a while, the game feels more like a chore that you’re forced to play. Thankfully, the game isn’t very long at all since you can beat it in about 6–7 hours. The multiplayer is OK, but nothing super special—just your standard FPS online action—and you won’t be coming back for this often since the mechanics are somewhat flawed. I really loved this game, though, since there were a lot of explosions, shooting, sneaking, Bond moves, and cool locales. If you want an awesome weekend rental, pick this up, and you’ll have a blast.