Quantum of Solace puts you in the shoes of super spy James Bond, and takes you through the plots of the two most recent Bond movies Casino Royale, and Quantum of Solace, and it does it in style. There are enough action packed gun fights, and intense situations to make you feel like you’re playing a big screen blockbuster rather than a video game. Enemies even die with Hollywood flair, falling over railings, and firing off a few final rounds into the air as you put more holes in them than a pound of Swiss cheese. Throw in the likeness, and voice talents of Daniel Craig, who plays James Bond in the movie this game is named for, and you have a game just oozing with style. Unfortunately, style only gets you so far.

The gameplay is pretty basic for an FPS. You can sprint, take cover, shoot from the hip, aim, jump, and crouch. The game puts a heavy emphasis on taking cover to protect yourself, and crouching to sneak up on unsuspecting enemies for a quick takedown. Unfortunately, the rules for what counts as “hidden” don’t seem very consistent. In some of the early levels, I was able to sneak up on, and pick off a good number of enemies without causing a fuss. In some of the later levels, enemies were able to “see” me before I had even entered into the same room as them. The game also uses a lot of outdated gameplay elements, such as glowing items, and invisible barriers. Well, I guess invisible isn’t exactly the right word—you can see the barriers, they’re just things you should be able to jump over, like velvet ropes, and small boxes. The one outdated gameplay element that stood out to me above all others was the cell phone collecting. In the first level, as I entered into Mr. White’s cellar, I spotted a cell phone just sitting on the floor glowing and ringing. At first, I was suspicious of it, thinking perhaps it was a trap. After a moment, I walked up to it and picked it up. It had an open text message on it stating that Mr. White’s shotgun had been moved to the cellar, and I thought to myself “Wow, one of these hired goons was stupid enough to leave their cell phone lying out in the open for me to find”. As it turns out, a lot of the enemies in this game are stupid enough to leave cell phones lying around with important information displayed on them. In fact, you can’t go more than twenty feet without tripping over one. This could have been fun and interesting had Treyarch made specific enemies throughout the game drop cell phones when you kill them. That would have made the player feel as thought they were collecting intel from defeated foes. Instead, it feels like 007 is working on opening his own T-Mobile franchise by collecting whatever phones he finds lying around—I guess MI6 just doesn’t pay very well.

It’s common knowledge among gamers that developers program enemies in any given game with artificial intelligence, or as it’s more commonly known, AI. Treyarch clearly decided to go a different route with this game, and they used what I’m going to refer to as AS, or artificial stupidity. From start to finish, I saw enemies fire at the ceiling, run around me to go to predetermined locations where they couldn’t get a shot in at me, and in one special instance, an enemy even ran right up to me, and just stood there looking right at me as if to say “Hi, my name is Steve. I’m new here. They told me to look for some guy named Bond, have you seen him?” Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I played the game through on normal difficulty. I went back, and tried a couple levels on hard, and found that the enemies were more aggressive, but still dumb as a box of hair.

The multiplayer is the one saving grace of the otherwise mediocre experience that is Quantum of Solace. The game features standard multiplayer game types like deathmatch, and team deathmatch, as well as some more interesting game types. Golden Gun has players trying to kill the player with the golden gun, while the player with the golden gun tries to survive. The golden gun packs one hell of an explosive punch, and will destroy any foe in one shot. If you kill the player with the golden gun, you get it, and it’s your turn to fight off your numerous adversaries. Bond Versus pits a lone James Bond against a team of Organization agents. Bond is attempting to deactivate two out of three available bombs, or take out all of the Organization agents, and the Organization agents are trying to thwart his efforts. Last but not least is Bond Evasion, in which there are two teams. On the MI6 team, one person is randomly designated as Bond, and has to be escorted to the escape point by his team mates, and the Organization has to kill Bond before he gets there. As you play through each match, you earn credits for killing your opponents, and winning rounds. These credits can be used to buy new weapons, upgrades for weapons, and gadgets such as a flak vest which reduces the amount of damage you take when hit. While the multiplayer is a lot of fun, it’s also very vacant. Putting this game up against Gears of War 2 on the 360, and Resistance 2 on the PS3 was a very bad move. I found myself running into the same handful of people in almost every match I played.

Quantum of Solace has some flaws, but overall, it’s not a terrible game, It’s just really basic. If this game had come out two years ago, I probably would have enjoyed it. Unfortunately, we’ve come a long way in those two years, and this game just doesn’t reflect the current standards in first person shooters. If you’re not really into video games, but you love James Bond movies, this game is for you. If you’re a level 42 Colonel in Halo 3, move along, there’s nothing for you here.

-Mike Kurz

Tags: Microsoft, PS3, Quantum of Solace, review, Sony, Xbox 360

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