007: The World is Not Enough

"Worthy Bond game, but I can see why Rare games are really rare!"

Worthy Bond game, but I can see why Rare games are really rare!

Appearance/Presentation (7/10): The game starts up and goes straight to a start menu where you choose your options of single, multi, options etc. which is great. However, this is not an ordinary game, it is a Bond game. Hello?! Is anything missing from this picture, like the opening sequence of 007 walking across the screen and shooting the eye to make blood poor down while playing Monty Norman’s theme? Sorry, not there, in fact, no bond music is ever heard, but it does play some pretty good alternate music and still gives the secret agent feel. I also noticed something I thought I would never see on a cartridge game, load time, which is very minimal. There are good talking sequences and they definitely stay very close to the story line.

Graphics (8/10): Overall, the graphics are pretty good, but very grainy in some spots and it seems like they were more made for a playstation type game. The detail isn’t quite as good as the infamous Perfect Dark or Goldeneye and you can notice that just from the screenshots. For example, you can shoot a guy in the head, and his torso will bleed. Despite the detail, this game shines high in the frame rate category keeping all movements as smooth as ever seen on a N64 First Person Shooter. Gun loading animations are cool, clean and realistic.

Sound (9/10): The music is great and it is some of the same music used as the TWINE theme. The gun sounds are superb. The shots themselves stay true to the type of gun as you can also hear the shells hit the ground, which is a very cool sound to hear while shooting at bad guys. Voice-overs are much better than heard in most other games and most characters sound like the actual actors did the voices themselves. However, Bond is a different story and doesn’t convince me of a Pierce Brosnan at all. The only bad part of the sound was of course the lack of the Bond theme music and sub-concisely, sometimes you don’t feel like your playing a Bond game at all. It is only a small missing detail, but again, it’s Bond and I feel it deserves at least it’s own theme song. I don’t know anyone who didn’t get pumped up playing Goldeneye because hearing the bond music while blasting through the levels.

Gameplay (8/10): Controls are tight, accurate, and pretty customizable even though I couldn’t put the look up/down as the C-up/C-down buttons (Like PD and GE). Another aspect you’ll notice very quickly is you can’t really tell if you’re getting hit unless you glance up at your life meter. What I usually look for is a signal (a sound, screen flashes red, shaking) to tell me that I’m in danger, but the only thing you can do is look up at your life bar and the screen won’t even shake at all. Another thing is that while you shoot an enemy, it doesn’t stun them at all and they won’t stop firing (accurately as well) until they’re dead. This feature really puts a downer to the multiplayer and doesn’t reward the player who can get the first shot, first hit advantage. Because if your being hit on any other FPS, you can’t fire back accurately, but this game allows you to do fire back as if they aren’t hitting you. The second functions of the guns are a great add in as well, but still not quite up to PD’s functions. It seems the only choices you have on most weapons are auto, or single shot. Overall, in this category, minor features take it down points, but it is still a very high point of the game.

Replay Value (7/10): You may go through single player mode twice or 3 times, but the first time when you don’t know the levels or what to do in them will bring most the challenge and fun in the game. You may play multiplayer for about an hour or 2 and I always find myself just wanting to put in Perfect Dark for a better multiplayer experience. An unfair aspect to this game is a lot of 64 owners may not play this too much anyway because of the highly anticipated release of Majora’s Mask, which is about a week after this game came out. I may put this one down for another Zelda game too because somehow, I don’t think that game will be disappointing. Not that TWINE is disappointing either, but this category is where the good developers get separated from the Elite. (Or should I say Dark?)

Overall (8/10): A good suggestion would be to put TWINE second on the priority list after Zelda. If you have enough money after accounting for Zelda, then buy this game because I definitely think despite the flaws, it still was worthy of winning my 56 dollars and 64 cents of hard earned money. I also give Hats off to Electronic Arts and Eurocom for doing a great job on this game and I have to admit, I was proven wrong from my assumptions after hearing that Rare wasn’t developing the game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/22/00, Updated 06/14/03