Everything or Nothing
This game got a bit blasted on the PS2 for the controls being complicated but I didn’t remember the controls being as bad as all that, though that may partly be because I played it on the GameCube where the controller worked better and partly because I was blinded by the fact that the game was basically a big budget Bond film with an opening credits sequence, big name actors and every frickin’ gadget you could possibly imagine. Really, all I needed to hear was Willem Dafoe would be a Bond villain, something I had been dreaming about for years. What EA did with Everything or Nothing was make a Bond movie (think Moonraker or The World is Not Enough not For Your Eyes Only or a Dalton film) into a game — and I couldn’t have been happier.
I had always thought that Bond would function better in a third-person perspective. The man is meant to be seen doing cool stuff. You don’t want to walk around being Bond (well, everyone wants to be Bond but you can’t be), you want to walk around seeing Bond do cool stuff and a third-person perspective allows for so much more cool interactive things. While the ‘Bond Moments’ are gone, you’re still rewarded for doing cool Bond stuff and can unlock lots of things by completing challenges in each level, some of which I am absolutely positively sure are impossible. While the shooting levels were fun (I love the lock on and then aim system personally) I loved the driving levels, especially when on a motorcycle since you could slide it onto its side to go under low hanging archways. At one point you slide under a wall only to come out the other side and pull of a massive jump. Awesome. Repelling was also a really neat trick since you could do it at multiple locations and levels solely designed for repelling, although it did get a little repetitive after a while.
That is until I got to the sky diving level where you basically had to jump Bond off a cliff and guide him around ledges while shooting bad guys. Awesome. Stealth levels were also a fun touch and something that was never well executed in FPS Bond games, they got especially cool when you could use the robotic spider to crawl up behind enemies and explode. Awesome. Needless to say I said “Awesome” a lot while playing this game simply because of the cinematic feel it had during many points.
Multiplayer was actually an interesting experience in the game since it wasn’t an FPS. There was a cooperative mode, which was fun (but had nothing to do with Bond), but the battle mode was more interesting. You ran around booby trapped stages shooting opponents in a fixed camera angle much like Power Stone 2. It was fun but I was never sure how well it worked because I only unlocked a few of the stages since the others were unlockable only by completing some of the more impossible co-op mission goals. Despite the lack of true quality multiplayer, if the goal of making a Bond game is to make the player feel like they’re in a Bond movie, then Everything or Nothing is really the pinnacle of EA’s Bond game making. This is incredibly obvious when you compare it too their next attempt at making a Bond franchise game: GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.
