James Bond 007: NightFire

"Fun game, but lots of wasted potential"

INTRODUCTION
Bond games are usually enjoyable and challengingly fun FPS games that have a widespread appeal. EA doesn't try to break the mold that GoldenEye originally set, but they apparently didn't try a lot to do anything original with this one either.

STORY
Usual Bond tripe that we've all seen. Bond must prevent an evil corporation from fulfilling its plans of world domination. Gunfights, double crosses, cliche'd plot twists and double entendre's ensue.
7/10

SINGLEPLAYER
The single player isn't exactly deep, rewarding, or ground breaking. Most levels boil down into running around a level doing errands and killing along the way, trying not to slip on all the spent shell casings that will no doubt be littered all over the floor. The game almost exclusively focuses on the shooting. While the gunplay is generally tense and action packed, the brain dead AI tends to break the action. Sometimes they will flee and shout taunts at you when you are not in their line of sight. Sometimes they'll shoot the wall behind you instead of aiming at you. Sometimes they'll stand there idly while their comrade gets a 9mm slug in the face.

To avoid making the gunplay boring, Gearbox has tossed in quite a lot of weapons. Most of them are real world weapons, such as the Glock G18, the P90, and the L96 sniper rifle. A host of the more interesting ones include a futuristic quad-barreled rocket launcher that shoots tracking missiles, a briefcase gun turret, and a large magazine fed chaingun. To add in some element of strategy, you are only allowed to carry four fire-arms at once, which forces you to make some tough choices: should I ditch the shotgun, which I may need later, or should I keep the shotgun and leave the rocket launcher that I just found? Q also has a nice repetoire of gadgets for you to play with, although many of them you will only get to use once or twice. You have your nifty cell phone grapple, your tranquilizer dart pen, and your watch laser, as well as other assorted gadgets. You rarely have to make use of the grapple, but you can use it to reach a lot of the game's secret areas. The laser watch acts as a lockpick, and you will often use it as such. It's a shame the watch doesn't harm people.

Gearbox has added in some variety in gameplay with two non-shooting elements. The first one is stealth. The fourth mission will focus almost exclusively on sneaking. Many of the stealth elements are well done, but a lot of the things you need to know will be learned the hard way. The guards are aggravating to get past. While their patrol routes are easy to memorize, you cannot shoot them, and some of them have the vision of Superman. More than once, a guard spotted me halfway across the room while I hid behind shelf, crouched. Yet later, he did not see me when I was facing him. This sort of polar AI makes this mission, and often, most of the game, both hilarious and frustrating. The second element is a third-person "hand over hand" element. The camera switches the 3rd person, and you have to do some climbing.

The main problem with the singleplayer is that it is just too hard. Making it through Mission 6 without using the cheats is a Herculean task, and one I'm sure not many will be up to performing. And if you do get past Mission 6, there's Mission 8 to prevent you from beating the game. The easy difficulty should've been toned down, or a lesser difficulty level should have been added. The singleplayer campaign is fun, but the mark goes down because of a lot of frustrating areas.
6.5/10

MULTIPLAYER
The multiplayer is about as simple as you get. There are only 3 modes availabe: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. Due to bad weapons balancing on Gearbox's part, most games will boil down to hogging the sniper/Ronin (briefcase machinegun)/land mines/rocket launcher. It is difficult to find a game that has decent players in it, and, if you're in North America, a server with decent ping. There's a small handful of maps, but only a few are actually a lot of fun to play. My favourites would include DM_Fortknox and DM_Island. Some of the more interesting features include the use of the phone grapple in multiplayer. You can use it to reach a lot of secret places to get nice weapons, or a full-armor pickup. The second is the fact that when you choose your multiplayer character as OddJob, your tranquilizer pen is replaced by a deadly top hat. Bottom line, multiplayer is decent fun if you can get a good game going.
7.5/10

GRAPHICS
Nice graphics and effects all around. You can barely tell that this game uses the Half-Life engine. Nice lighting effects, well-rendered characters and models, along with aesthetically pleasing levels. The model of Pierce Brosnan is spot on. Overall, a good job, but nothing extremely spectacular.
8.5/10

SOUND
The sound is nothing particularly special either. Some nice sound clips and effects, though the explosions sound particularly weak. The cutscene voice acting is well done, though Bond's voice sounds a little to deep and throaty. The music consists of a few decent techno tracks and several dozen variations of the classic Bond theme.
8.5/10

CONCLUSION
The reason this game is ranked so low is because of the bugs. The AI is about as smart as a peanut, and has the vision of a blind man at times. Sometimes you'll get stuck in odd places in the map - the only way to remedy this is reload an earlier saved game, or, in a multiplayer game, commit suicide or just wait to die. Lastly, it's the lack of replayability and lasting appeal. A very fun game to pick up for it's relatively low price [right now it's about $10], but wouldn't have been worth it's initial price.

OVERALL
6/10 [Not an average]

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/23/05