James Bond: The Duel

"A Bond game in name only."

Game developers really have it good: if they feel they have a poor game on their hands, the only thing they must do is acquire a licence, edit a few sprites, add a new title screen, and what should rightfully have been a flop suddenly sells by the bucketload. Judging by the number of reviews, James Bond 007: The Duel wasn't an overly successful game - the (undeserved) lack of success of the two preceding Timothy Dalton films probably didn't help - but had Domark not held the Bond licence, they probably wouldn't have bothered releasing it at all.

The first thing to strike the player about The Duel are the game's overly saturated colours. The vividly orange hull of the supply ship in level 1 is absolutely seizure-inducing, so make sure you turn the brightness and contrast settings well down before playing. (The visuals do become somewhat more subdued later on, but I wasn't going to let the game catch me off guard like this again.) The sprites, although rather small, are on the other hand nicely animated, and I thought Bond's bending down to pick up items where you'd merely walk into them in most games was particularly nice. However, all animations are canned and the first time I caught a bullet on that account, I wasn't that impressed anymore. The backgrounds that the game is set against for one thing don't resemble those from the films, though that's the least of their problems as the way they are integrated into the game is simply ridiculous. It's often difficult to tell background art against platforms, you can never be really sure whether the platform ends in a physical wall or only a drawn one, while occasionally, objects in the foreground can obscure the enemies altogether, again putting the player at a disadvantage.

The audio in The Duel's is a complete let down - apart from the first few notes from Monty Norman's "James Bond Theme", all in-game music is comprised of generic MIDI tunes while the sound effects are muffled, mixed in too low and altogether bland, and I was particularly disappointed to find that there were no speech samples from the films - even the abomination that was Lethal Weapon on the SNES had those. For me, this was a clear enough indication that Domark weren't at all interested in properly exploiting the game's licence, not even in the departments where no real design and programming effort is required.

The controls are as flawed as they are unsuited to the nature of the game. Bond's only decent move is, of all things, jumping, which can be nicely controlled and which you'll do a lot of - level 2 in particular feels rather like Donkey Kong Country - ladder climbing and shooting are serviceable with forgiving collision detection however crouching has been botched so scandalously that it almost single-handedly kills the gameplay. The enemies in The Duel fittingly shoot first and ask questions later and ducking is the only defence you have against their bullets. However, not only can you not move or even change directions while crouching - in case you fail to first halt your character before you press "down", you won't be able to crouch at all. Similarly, when jumping, you cannot crouch-land, nor can you stay down after climbing ladders. With vicious kickback and no invincibility period (and let's not forget the notoriously imprecise directional pad on the Mega Drive controller), this poor design decision is the cause of much frustration.

Game mechanics are about as annoying as the controls, mostly due to their inconsistency, which is a definite no-no if you want to make a fair, fun game. Whether you'll live or die is regulated by some pretty counter-intuitive rules. For instance, if you approach an enemy straight on, he'll reach for his gun and aim, giving you a few moment's advantage. If you jump up on the platform or drop down from above, the same enemy will react instantly, and with the lack of crouch-landing, you really don't stand a chance. Even though you can shoot diagonally (but not straight up or down), there are some enemies that you simply can't reach, and games that force you to take a few hits along the way are the embodiment of poor design. Enemy respawn is also done in a rather strange way - only some of them do respawn, and since there's no way of telling which, you can never be certain that you really cleared the area. Consequently, you progress through the game crouching every couple of yards just in case an enemy might rush you from the edge of the screen, walk half a screen, crouch again, etc., which, if nothing else, rather takes away from the immediacy of action.

I love Bond and I would've probably endured through all the cheap gameplay - imagine dying almost as much as in Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, but hardly ever due to your own mistakes as the game is not really difficult at all - but once I realised that you're only given one continue, not per level but in the entire game, I chose not to waste my time any further. Essentially, The Duel feels as if Domark had realised that their Bond licence was to run out in a couple of months and quickly threw together an uninspired game with frustrating gameplay and no redeeming features whatsoever. Apart from the (laughably easy) bosses roughly resembling various Bond villains, the main character's tuxedoed sprite is the only recognisable Bond trademark; there are no gadgets to play with, no vehicles to lay waste in, and no one-liners to finish off a level - even Bond's gun evidently isn't the Walther PPK as it only holds six rounds. Thus, for an action platformer experience on the Mega Drive, you might want to look into Namco's James Bond-inspired Rolling Thunder series - ironically, those games feel much closer to the Bond franchise than Domark's half-hearted licensed effort, with vastly superior gameplay to boot.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/04/06