James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire

"I'll have a martini. Shaken, not -- oh screw it I'm bored."

James Bond is not exactly a series for the intellectual masses. Do not deny this fact. If you're watching a James Bond movie, then you're most likely in it for the popcorn-flick element of it all -- anyone who appreciates the films on a higher level is probably completely missing the point. You can dress it up with as big of a budget as you like, but it'll still be the same cheesy, campy spy romp that it always has been.

James Bond video games, on the other hand, don't exactly follow this pattern. Though the British super-spy has had some rather disastrous 16-bit excursions, his video game arsenal became formidable with the advent of GoldenEye. Widely considered the best FPS on the system, even in spite of its relatively early release date, the game was well loved by generally all audiences. The World Is Not Enough, GoldenEye's first successor to be released on the same system, was another high quality game (though not as beloved as its predecessor). It was no GoldenEye, as basically anyone will tell you, but it certainly held its own in the FPS field of that day. Then the GameCube came along, and James Bond's first offering to the fledgling next-gen system was Agent Under Fire. And that trend of excellence took a very quick, very gory plummet.

I assure you, I'm not a biased audience. I really liked Nightfire, so I don't think the Gamecube Bond games are completely irredeemable; on the other hand, it also proves that this game has even less of an excuse for being so shoddy. Nightfire was developed only eight months after Agent Under Fire, and there is a distinct jump in quality between the two titles. This game, quite simply, has absolutely nothing to stand on. Well, except the smoldering pile of failures that it's left in its wake.

Fundamentally, a first-person shooter is pretty hard to mess up. Point. Click. Boom. It's always satisfying to mow down a legion of enemies with your trusty automatic rifle, or to pick off an unsuspecting guard with a silenced pistol if that's more your speed. And with Bond elements like gadgets and cool cars in the mix, it seems even more inconceivable that the game could flounder so badly. Unfortunately, Agent Under Fire meets and exceeds the expectations in this department. There's problems in the very core of the game: its shooting mechanics. First off, whenever you whip out your gun and take it to some hapless grunt, he barely flinches at all. For some bizarre reason the enemies in this game have absolutely no nerve receptors, so they don't respond to your shots until they've crumpled to the floor dead. They may twitch a little, but generally they just keep shooting, regardless of where you've just pumped lead into them. GoldenEye got this right: you shoot an enemy in the leg, he clasps his leg, and if you shoot him in the arm then he grabs his arm in pain. Here, they flinch minimally and go back to their daily routine. By the way, if the enemy is in the middle of a scripted event like pulling an alarm, then they won't react at ALL. You can empty an entire round into their back, but unless you get them in the head it's completely useless. I honestly can't think of a reason for why the shooting is so bunged up.

Oh, and the part about the gadgets? Go ahead and throw that out the window too. Agent Under Fire manages to turn what could be an advantage for its gameplay into a nightmarish, tedious excursion. All of the gadgets are used so uncreatively and on-cue that you wonder why they included them in the first place. Oh look, here's a lock. I don't suppose I have to use my Q-LASER, right? Hey, why can't I use my Q-Laser on these iron bars? Why doesn't it hurt my opponent when I drill this little beam of searing light into his eye? Yeah, if your dispatcher's technological branch is going to give you a gadget as cool as a portable laser, you might want to make sure you can use it on something else besides freaking padlocks. Take also the Q-Claw, which might have been a nifty innovation if you could use it on more than one thing. The Q-Claw's usages are limited solely to when you see a circular silver grid tacked to a wall or ceiling; never mind using it anywhere else in any other level. The use of any decryptors or remotes you may have are always designated by huge red circles bursting out of the target, and once you've done that your new target becomes green. This isn't spying, it's stupidity.

It's not just the gadgets that fall under this curse; everything in Agent Under Fire is blatantly, unapologetically linear. In GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough, if you played on a harder difficulty level then you would constantly be running out of your way to appease some ridiculously difficult mission objective, which just added to the challenge and ultimately the fun factor. GoldenEye in particular featured superb level design (with a few exceptions) which would have you backtracking and searching hard to find your next objective. In Agent Under Fire, all you have to do is move from Point A to Point B. That's it. For one, you don't get any extra objectives on the higher difficulties, and the few objectives you do receive always have you proceeding in one direction. If being a spy is this easy, then I believe I have a phone call to make to the CIA.

This game desperately tries to mix it up a little with the advent of 'Bond Moves', little rewards you get for doing things that are 'Bondly'. During the first level, it seems like a pretty cool innovation, but after that it goes completely out the window. You get Bond Moves for the dumbest and most arbitrary things. Using your Q-Claw for the 50th time hardly merits a reward, I think. COOL LOOK AT ME SWING ON THINGS LIKE I DID TEN LEVELS AGO. And the fickle nature of these Bond Moves make accumulating them (and on that note, the Platinum Medals) even more frustrating. For example, in a driving level, you get a Move for shooting an explosive barrel with a rocket...but not with your machine gun. Seriously, it's the same thing, and I'd kind of like to save that rocket.

Honestly, any sensation you may have of being a "spy" throughout Agent Under Fire is completely eradicated. The levels will never reward you for stealth, but instead just random acts of violence. Even the Bad Diplomacy level, which suggests that you shouldn't kill any guards lest you anger the Foreign Embassy, removes the guards from the map after you tranquilize them anyway. The game doesn't end after you're discovered, so you may as well wantonly run around and shoot whoever strays across your path. It doesn't compromise the difficulty, considering how easy the game is on basically any level. There's scads of Body Armor scattered throughout your theaters of operation, you'll never run short of ammo and the pathetic AI design all add up to a decidedly remedial experience.

Oh, and speaking of remedial, we still have the plot to deal with. In short, the James Bond license is hardly doing this game any favors. Dabbling in the science of cloning shafts the game even further. What we are dealing with here is a downright pathetic amalgam of evil villain clones, bizarre plot strings about turning the leaders of the world into clones or something, and no fewer than four vehicular chases. I know that it's a James Bond story and that kind of means it's scraping the bottom of the barrel automatically, but come ON. To draw yet another comparison, GoldenEye nailed the campiness of the series perfectly, infusing it with the character and coy humor that the game needed. Agent Under Fire takes itself and its formula with embarrassing seriousness.

Where doesn't Agent Under Fire fail? Well...the car levels are actually kind of fun. Still, they are a little diluted by virtue of useless gadgets and insipid mission objectives. I kind of wish I could just drive around the city for a while and shoot random things, but alas. It isn't really an aesthetic failure either -- for a first generation GameCube title, the game looks and sounds pretty good. There's some weird texture issues and a few glitches in the sound, especially pertaining to the volume level of talking characters, but other than that it manages to stand out in this regard. Multiplayer, though par for the course for an FPS, redeems the game a little bit. And ultimately, the experience of blasting through waves of soldiers is entertaining for a little bit. Still, this is all giving the game a little too much credit. I could probably name 15 FPSs I've played off the top of my head that are better than this one. Now that I think about it, those 15 are probably all the other FPSs I've played ever. With that, I would end this review on a clever pun involving a James Bond reference, but I think a simple "stay away" will suffice. Seriously.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/08/06