Agent Under Fire
I really can’t applaud EA enough for branching out and making their own Bond adventures. For one, it let them move away from GoldenEye which by this time they must have realized they would never top, and for another it allowed them to shove in as much Bond-esque stuff as they could in a game. The best part is that they realized that Bond is an “it,” not a person and that they didn’t need Brosnan’s likeness (though his later return is awesome too). In a move much like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when Connery left the series and Lazenby took over, the posters and box art shroud Bond in shadow playing on his iconic image instead of a single person. Once you get in the game Bond is a strange combination of Fleming’s original description, Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan. It actually works surprisingly well.
The game works surprisingly well too, at least in my opinion, especially since they figured out a better way of sorting through gadgets or at least the new generation’s controllers were better at sorting through gadgets. Of course my opinion probably doesn’t matter that much since I’m usually blinded by Bond too much to notice quality. Still, I absolutely loved that they put in driving levels and included another tank chase. I’m easy to please, especially since most of the driving levels played more like kart racers with simple driving. Of course this is Bond so it works perfectly – cars should be able to maneuver around insane corners while shooting homing missles…duh. The game did get a little long and the plot was right out of one of a late Connery/late Moore/late Brosnan film when bigger was better, but all Bonds need these things. What I really loved in this one was the fleshing out of “Bond moments.” If you did something cool, or seduced a woman or killed a guy in some way you got a Bond moment and these moments would unlock secrets throughout the level. It was a great way to get the player into thinking like an over the top secret agent and upped the replay value plenty if you’re a completionist like I am. Multiplayer was fun but not as well designed as it could have been.
Overall EA still had some kinks to work out as the story gets a little long near the end, and while you feel far more like Bond in this game than in The World is Not Enough, that whole ‘je ne sais quoi’ is still a bit lacking. By the end of the game I felt I was playing with more of a Rambo than a Bond. It’s a hard balance to keep though so you can’t blame them. After Agent Under Fire I was pretty excited for what would come next hoping they would perfect the sort of over the top Bond action since you could see them beginning to get a grasp on it in this game. So I sat with my fingers crossed until: Nightfire.
