James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire

"Pretty good, but could've been better"

James Bond's first foray onto the GameCube is 007: Agent Under Fire. Now, everyone knows that the most popular and most influential console FPS was Goldeneye. Goldeneye is still known for it's amazing depth, stealthy gameplay, varied missions and unlockables. After Goldeneye's developer, Rare, declined to make more games, EA took over the franchise.

First off is the story. This is the first Bond game to have it's own story, instead of being based on a movie. AUF has Bond working with CIA agents and other spies in order to take down an evil corporation attempting to take over the world with evil cloning technology. It all moves along in short, in-engine cutscenes that usually occur before and after a mission. The story isn't particularly deep, and the plot twists are obvious or lame, and characters are pretty shallow. However, the FPS genre isn't known for having great stories, and this one is a good excuse to kill terrorists in a variety of different locations.

Next comes the graphics. The graphics aren't too shabby, considering it's a first generation game. The assorted NPC, weapon and item models look pretty good. The game uses a variety of textures over and over again, resulting in many similar looking corridors and hallways. A lot of the game environment looks very shiny; something that is prominent throughout the entire game. The Pierce Brosnan model is passable, but not great.

The sound in this game isn't unique at all. You have the usual FPS fanfare of bullets, bombs, etc. The voice acting isn't bad; at least they picked decent actors to imitate Judi Dench and Pierce Brosnan. The most notable thing audio-wise is the music. Unlike other games, where the music is often in the background to set the mood or to get your adrenaline pumpin, in AUF the music is in your face and loud. There are lengthy techno bits that play throughout the game, and blaring renditions of the 007 theme that occur often.

Of course, the most important part of any game is the gameplay. Even if the graphics and audio are wonderful, a game will fall apart if it plays like crap. AUF is a hybrid game, with driving and rail-shooting missions, although the FPS levels make up the majority of the game. First off are the driving missions. The driving missions are a mixed bag. The enemies aren't very smart or very dangerous. The most dangerous one, being a gunship that launches rockets, can be taken down with a few missiles. When driving, you'll have control of the famous Aston Martin car, equipped with machineguns that have infinite amounts of ammo, unguided rockets, seeking missiles, oil slicks and nitrous boosters. A driving mission is fairly simple: get from point A to point B without damaging your car to the point where you die.

Secondly, there are the rail-shooting missions. These feature Bond in a car, either driven by himself, oddly, or someone else, while he also pops out of the sunroof and opens fire on anything he sees with his AK47. Enemies in the rail-shooting segments are tougher than the driving segment enemies. These range from thugs with UZIs and rocket launchers driving armoured limousines to cheaply placed rocket snipers and deadlier gunships with more powerful missiles. In these missions you have no control over anything except your gun, so unfortunately you can't steer away from those nasty rocket snipers in the distance. These missions can become quite difficult as Bond stupidly charges head-on into a hail of gunfire. To protect Bond, you'll garner an AK47 equipped with a scope, several flavours of rocket launcher, and a nigh useless shotgun.

Lastly comes the meat of AUF, the FPS missions. In these missions you're given a very large selection of real world semi-automatic and automatic weapons to shoot away at those filthy terrorist scumbags. These weapons range from your basic pistols and SMGS, to heavy duty assault rifles and anti-armour weapons. The majority of these guns shoot very fast and very inaccurately, putting a lot of lead in the air. Fortunately, levels are littered with ammo and armour pickups that serve as health, so you can just spray away. However, the game rewards you if you conserve ammo and aim wisely before pulling the trigger. To accompany Bond's wide selection of weaponry is a large cache of gadgets. These range from X-ray specs to grappling hooks and universal remotes that sadly can't turn be used on your TV. You'll need all of this to fight off wave after wave of mindless terrorists that have poor AI. They usually don't notice you unless you're in their face or if you decide to make a huge racket by, say, detonating a few grenades in the room. They're only really dangerous when they swarm around in droves, firing their automatic guns at you wildly. The terrorists have also employed snipers packed with powerful rifles that also happen to have laser pointers indicating their exact location. These guys can take you out in one or two hits, but they're easy to neutralise if you're able to move in close or if you can get them before you're in their line of sight. Lastly, a few boss fights are sprinkled into the game. These involve special characters with devious evil laughs and lots of health and heavy weapons. Running away and shooting at them is the best strategy for killing each of them.

To break up the monotomy of the game are special collectibles and moves. These are Bond moves, and there are a healthy dose of them throughout the game. These include using your gadgets or just doing other Bond-like stuff. Some of these are hidden and others are done during the course of normal play. Once these are triggered, you'll hear a loud symphony blasting the Bond theme in your ears. Performing these tasks grants you extra points to your point count, which shows up after the mission completion screen. If you score enough points, you'll receive a rating of either Gold, Silver or Bronze. Once you score Gold, you'll get singleplayer bonuses and can redo the mission and collect 007 logo tokens. If you get Gold and these tokens you receive a Platinum rating, unlocking bonus stuff that ranges from new multiplayer weapons and characters to new multiplayer maps and game modes. However, most of AUF's content is already unlocked and the majored of the unlockables aren't worth your time.

Aside from the aforementioned unlockables, once you're finished with the singleplayer, you can have a go at the multiplayer. Here there are deathmatch and CTF variants. There are quite a few maps available, but most of them are really dull or have a cluttered layout. You can customize the weapons, gravity, rules and gadgets available in each match. Another nice feature is the ability to play with computer controlled bots, although they act more or less like the singleplayer enemies.

I do have quite a few bones to pick with AUF. First, there are the horrendous controls. These controls are easy to learn, but take ages to get used to. Playing an FPS with the GameCube controller also feels really awkward. You have three different control sets - one for driving, one for rail-shooting and one for normal play. If you want to customize the controls, you can't customize these sets separately - if you pick Setup 4 for normal play, you also have to use Setup 4 for driving and rail-shooting as well. You also cannot adjust the sensitivity of the control and C-stick for singleplayer, along with other options such as auto-switching guns and crouch toggle, all of which are only available in multiplayer. Also lacking is the feature to manually configure the controls yourself, although it is possible that that wasn't feasible at the time of release. Secondly, there's the uneven difficulty. The first half of the game is easy to fly by, with little to no hard enemies and plentiful amounts of armour pickups. The second half features longer levels with almost no breaks in between the relentless action, along with tougher and bigger swarms of enemies. This problem wouldn't be a big deal if there were some sort of checkpoint system. Each mission in AUF has a certain amount of lives, but all this does in send you back to the last loading area, allowing you to replay that part of the mission. Unfortunately, as you go on, there are little to no loading areas, forcing you to replay extremely long segments of a level repeatedly until the game finally sends you to a mission failure screen.

Pros:
+ It's Bond; you can't go wrong
+ Variety of shooting, driving and rail segments
+ Lots of guns and gadgets to play with
+ Decent graphics, sound, and level layout
+ AI bots in multiplayer
+ Unlockables

Cons:
- Stupid, stupid singleplayer AI
- Uneven difficulty
- Most unlockables are pretty worthless
- No checkpoints and replaying parts endlessly
- Bad controls and lack of customization

Overall: 8 out of 10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/06