This Month Games! James Bond 007: Legends Review

"Go buy a tuxedo and Call of Duty, not this...In something that’s so awful it’s hard to play for more than 5 minutes “The game’s bad… Real bad” as a pun for 007′s most iconic catchphrase is infinitely better than the game itself."

Let me prerequisite this review by saying that I am a huge Bond fan. I have the boxset on Blu-ray and even enjoy watching On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, so I am far from a Bond hater. My love for the Bond movies is not the reason I hate this game. Some Bond purists scowl at Daniel Craig being portrayed in the classic movies, but I quite like this touch. I also like Daniel Craig and following the recent success of Skyfall, I don’t think I’m alone.

The reason I hate this game is because… IT SUCKS!

With such a beloved character and the admittedly clever ideas that the game employs, such as showing the intro to Skyfall and seeing Bond get shot then fall into the water and relive the iconic moments from the movies within memories and hallucinations, have the potential to be a really, really good first person shooter. What let’s it down then, I hear you ask? Firstly, it’s apparent that the game looks like something from the last generation of consoles. The frame-rate is choppy and even the cut scenes have a lot to be desired graphically. Character models look like they were outsourced to the first person they could find to create them on the internet and little care an attention has been placed on, well, anything.

The full game is basically a Call of Duty clone, so you expect the story to not be fantastic, but the controls, multiplayer and gameplay to be king. The story kind of goes off in different directions and people who are unfamiliar with the movies it is portraying will probably get lost pretty quickly – so, that’s as we predicted. Now on to controls… If we are sticking with the CoD formula, these should be responsive, refined, accurate, wait, wait, wait… Before you get excited I must point out that the controls are by far the worst aspect of the game. The ‘customisable’ sensitivity is a joke, at the lowest level it is too slow, yet move one increment faster and you’re looking all around the screen with your eyes darting about more than a restless puppy. Aiming is just a guessing game rather than a display of skill and the cover system is so bad that it shouldn’t have even been included in the game. Multiplayer may be our saving grace though, right?


After all, Goldeneye was the best multiplayer game of it’s time and before I bought it, I used to go to the house of a kid that I hated every weekend, just to get my 4 player fix. Fast forward 15 or so years and if that kid had a copy of the game, I would hate him even more. It is impossible to get a game on the online multiplayer because everyone that has played the game has either pulled their eyes out or set themselves on fire.Did anyone other than me actually complete this game? Wait, no… A better question (to find out which ones of you are mentally unstable): Did anyone actually play this game for more than 5 minutes?