Nightfire
Veering away from their made up Bond look, probably because EA realized they were rich and having Brosnan’s face would sell more copies especially with the success of the current Bond film, Nightfire brings Brosnan’s likeness (but not his voice) back to gaming. Nightfire was basically Agent Under Fire perfected…or as perfect as the game could get. Driving was tweaked a bit better so that open city racing and car shooting was way more fun and easy to handle, level designs were moved from slightly boring to pretty clever with plenty of variance in style (from riding on a snow mobile to sniping from a moving helicopter). Plus the Bond moments in this game all seemed just so right. My personal favorite being after a car chase, driving my Aston Martin V12 Vanquish off a ramp, across a river and through a glass ceiling all to land in a large pile of boxes or something. But there were also levels where you were forced to use some stealth or simply walk around a party and mingle with gorgeous women. Perfect Bond.
I have to admit I played the hell out of this game and in all honesty it might be my favorite Bond FPS, yes, even over GoldenEye, which I always sucked at for some reason. The game was seriously just fun and full of that Bond ‘je ne sais quoi.’ This is a Bond game that feels like you’re playing through a Bond movie and it also hints at the third-person games to follow by continually taking you out of the first-person perspective. It might also be one of the best one-on-one multiplayer shooters ever. Or at least I remember it that way since my roommate and I played the multiplayer against each other non-stop.
Multiplayer levels were set up amazingly well, mostly ignoring size and complication for smaller and easy to understand levels. My favorite was ‘Ravine,’ if memory serves. It was basically two buildings on either side of a gorge only connected by a thin strip of land. This level made for some great distance shooting especially with the games surprisingly un-cheap hand controlled missile launcher. In my mind, this was one of the last FPS games to design their multiplayer around smaller groups of friends playing together, as opposed to massive online battles.
So I’m ecstatic. I’ve got a new Bond game where I love the multiplayer, love replaying the levels for ‘Bond Moments’ and can actually stand the not-as-stupid-as-it-could-have-been plot. I figure EA has it down pat, they couldn’t really do much better. So imagine my excitement when I first read about: Everything or Nothing.
