Game Overview

Developer: Gearbox
Publisher: EA
Official Site

Bond like Sean Connery? …

Games based on movie franchises have long been a running joke in the gaming community. All too often, they rely on the rabid nature of the property’s fanbase to sell units, as opposed to actually delivering quality gameplay. Think of all the Star Wars games that Lucas Arts botched before they got smart and started outsourcing games to Raven, Bioware, and Verant. Remember all the terrible Acclaim games based on TV or the movies? The trend has slowly turned around in recent times, with Raven producing competent Star Trek shooters in Elite Force, the critical acclaim received by The Thing, and the generally well-received Lord of the Rings: Two Towers game on console. Can 007: Nightfire continue the streak?

Need bigger gun

Oooh sneaky

Snipey snipey

…or like George Lazenby

Strategically, EA did the right thing by separating the development of the console and PC versions of Nightfire. Whereas the console games have as much of a driving element as they do a shooter component, Gearbox and EA chose to make the PC version of Nightfire strictly a shooter. On paper it was a good idea, because PC gamers and console gamers have different tastes, and some types of levels translate better on console, while others work better on PC. In practice, the PC version of Nightfire feels more like a red-headed stepchild instead of a brother to the console games.

Now his dead body floats slowly down

Grainy cutscenes

Man

The story, as it were

Nightfire’s plot puts Bond on the trail of Rafael Drake, a businessman who runs a large multinational corporation known as Phoenix International. Phoenix’ primary business is dismantling nuclear missiles on behalf of governments looking to scale down their nuclear arsenals in order to comply with disarmament treaties. How this is such a profitable business that Phoenix can be spread out across continents and form its own space program is puzzling, but the real Bond movies have had bigger plot holes, so we’ll let this one slide. The point is that Drake is secretly skimming some of the nuclear materiel to make his own arsenal and plans to use those weapons to threaten the rest of the world. Bond’s pursuit of Drake will take him across many diverse locales, including an Austrian castle, a Japanese-style mansion, the obligatory super-dooper-secret island base, and an orbiting space station.