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Not what we were expecting this time round...

by sbc515 on July 13, 2023
2 out of 5 starsScore: 40/100

This action racing-based game is based on the James Bond license, developed by Eutechnyx in association with EA Canada and published by Electronic Arts for the PlayStation. It is a spin-off of the James Bond video game series. Even though the title hints at a racing game, it's actually a poor hybrid of Driver and Twisted Metal. It also shows that combining action-adventure driving with vehicular combat filtered though the lens of a licensed property is almost always going to end up in disaster. In fact the game can't decide if it wants to be a racing game or an action game.

Because of the poor controls, every car handles like a tank and takes forever to accelerate, which makes avoiding enemy gunfire more difficult than necessary. The blurry, blocky visuals make it even worse when you're racing.

You can't run over your enemies, meaning that the only way to kill them is using weapons, but if you run out of ammo, consider yourself screwed. When you pick up a weapon, it instantly becomes your default item, so you could be firing machine gun bullets and then accidentally run into a missile and start firing those instead. Your rockets are side-mounted, alternating fire from the left and right sides of your car. If you don't keep track of exactly which side of your car is the next to fire, lining up even midrange rocket shots is needlessly difficult, as you don't have any crosshair to aim better. What's worse is that firing a missile causes you to lose health, which makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE at all! And for some reason the laser weapons will fire from the sides of your vehicle instead of the front, making the laser-based missions really tedious and imprecise.

Speaking of, the missions are bland, as is the level design itself. Some missions are also very cryptic, for example, in the third mission you have to destroy two forklifts, but none of your weapons will make any damage (nor even the missiles), to destroy them, you have to make them crash into some explosive boxes in the area, how are you supposed to know that? If you destroyed the boxes previously, the only thing you can do is restart the mission. And if that's not enough, the mission ranking is based on your percentage level. If you complete a level below the pass percentage requirement, it counts as a failed mission, and you have to do it all over again. On the other hand, the game's story is decent, and features nods to characters from previous movies, such as Whisper from Live and Let Die.

The audio mixing is very poorly done. The music in-game is ear-rapingly loud, but, despite that, it is pretty decent and fits well to the game. The music will stop for a brief moment when a character talks. The announcer is extremely annoying and seems to care more about the car's paintjob than you.

EA, I have had it. If you never learned from your mistakes, other companies will destroy you and Activision and Ubisoft. You need to start supporting gamers more acceptably when it comes to games like this.

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