The moon turns blood red, the oceans boil, and EA creates a good licensed game. Details at 11.

User Rating: 8.7 | James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing PS2
By argianas | Review Date:
GAMEPLAY: After trying a few rather bad James Bond game after getting the license, they decided to essentially create an interactive movie. In true EA fashion, in addition to the usual cast found in the movies, they cast a few known actors to play the villians and the Bond girls. Here you play Bond in the third person, and are given an assortment of weapons and gadgets to advance through the story. The game has roughly 30 short missions, roughly 5 minutes if you move swiftly through it but taking 10 or even upwards of 15 or 20 minutes if you move cautiously. Each mission has a set of goals, be it to hit switches to move forward, battle bosses, rescue a captive, disable defenses, or get to the other side of the course. Throughout the mission, enemies attack you at specific areas, which you can dispatch using weapons, your fists, or an assortment of gadgets like sleeper darts or exploding coins. In some courses you drive vehicles, be it a car, a motocycle, a helicopter, or a tank, and likewise are often pursued by enemy forces while you chase a target or race to a certain point. The gadgets can be rather interesting, including a spider-like robot you can use to move through small openings and destroy a console, an EMP coin bomb that can knock out mechanical equipment, or a device that lets you take control of equipment like a missile turret or a parked tank, allowing you to turn the enemy's firepower upon itself. Perhaps the best part are the Bond Moments, instances where you can do a special move to make things easier. These include shooting a chandelier to have it crash down on a few enemies below, shooting explosive barrels next to an enemy, jumping over a roadblock of tanks, or dispatching a few specific patrolling guards non-lethally without being detected. While some Bond Moments are easy to detect (like seeing a ramp next to a roadblock of tanks on a driving mission), and some even seem to be required mission objectives, a good portion of them aren't immediately obvious, forcing you to keep a lookout for something that seems slightly out of place or the environment around your enemies. At normal difficulty it usually took me a couple of runs to learn the environment and where enemies are located in order to beat each mission, though I'm not good at nor usually play shooters. Driving missions usually didn't take me as long to defeat.

GRAPHICS: EA used the likenesses of Bond, Q, M, and a few others like Jaws (who appears as a couple of boss fights), along with the likenesses of actors cast to play the villians. The game takes place in settings in Egypt, Peru, New Orleans, and Moscow, with each pretty accurately reflecting the feel of each environment or other known landmarks. The graphics themselves are pretty good given the release date of the game.

SOUND: The regular actors give some very good voice acting, as they're playing characters they've played in multiple films and are very familiar with their roles. The new characters also do a good job with their lines, especially Willem Dafoe. The music is your typical type of score you'd find in a Bond movie (notice the pattern?) and fits in well with each mission (be it fast and full of action or slow and stealthy). The sound effects all seem to be pretty well done as well.

VALUE: Not only does the game have about 30 missions with three difficulty settings (easy, normal, hard), but you get a score for each run depending on how many Bond Moments you triggered, enemies neutralized and the means in which they were, weapon efficiency, and elapsed time. If you reach a certain score on the normal difficulty (which isn't too hard to achieve in the earlier missions but noticably require better and better performance as you advance), you can unlock production stills and weapon upgrades and the like. If you meet certain requirements on the hard mode you can unlock cheats. Meeting all the goals will take a good amount of time to accomplish. The game features a story-based co-op mode which I never got to play yet. The game used to have an online multiplayer, but by the time you read this it will no longer be available per the standard EA policy of shutting down the service as soon as a sequel is released.

TILT: I don't have too much experience with GoldenEye for the N64, but this has to be one of the top two Bond games available (which may not be saying much as most of the rest were rather bad). The story feels like it's right out of the Bond films, toss in the presentation values and it feels like you're actually interacting in an actual Bond movie (just with less dialogue and more action). If you're even a passing Bond fan, this will be a good title to give a try, despite who made the game. I admit that I don't look too favoribly upon EA and dislike their practices, but every so often they try something new and produce something that's very good (then, of course, they start pumping out mediocre copies of the games as sequels like an assembly line). Since this game is a Greatest Hits title, the affordable price should give you a lot of bang for your buck.

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