007: Nightfire (PS2, XBX, GC)
By Susie Vee

PLATFORM: PS2, XBX, GC

PUBLISHER: EA

DEVELOPER: Eurocom

GENRE: 1st-Person Shooter

ESRB: Teen

SCORE:

Like a critically acclaimed book or film that everyone raves about but maybe not everyone’s seen, Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 is the holy grail of James Bond games. A nifty little shooter released in 1997, Goldeneye managed to be one of the only decent multiplayer FPS games on the N64. Ever since then, it seems your average game publication can’t go more than two issues without mentioning how great it was and how today’s games just don’t stack up.

To be fair, pretty much every other game in the James Bond franchise since then has been pretty lame. This time around, EA is upping the stakes a bit by finally getting Pierce Brosnan to get his face scanned for the title character and planning a high-profile release for both consoles and PC.

Instead of piggybacking on the film Die Another Day, this game has a unique plot and title -- Nightfire -- but ties into the current film by virtue of being released at the same time.

Like most console shooters, there’s a certain lack of precision in your shooting. Despite a wide variety of gadgets and weapons, if often feels like a linear shooter, where you’re running from location to location shooting people as you go. We’re so used to sophisticated action/stealth games these days that Nightfire’s shoot-first-ask-questions-later aesthetic threw us for a loop at first and took a little getting used to.

On the bright side, the missions attempt to break up the potential monotony by throwing in all kinds of different levels, including some incredibly fun driving levels and a few less-welcome rail-shooting sections.

The PC version drops these driving levels for a few additional FPS levels, but we’d rather have kept the driving.

Graphically, the game looks decent, while not state of the art. But a lot of time and attention clearly went into the faces and facial animations. There are many control schemes to choose form, each named after a Bond movie, but oddly, none that were entirely to our liking.

We were hoping for a more nuanced approach to the game, instead of a largely run-and-gun mechanic that seems old hat. But if you’re a James Bond fan, or you’re looking for a decent is not terribly deep shooter, then Nightfire could be for you.

The typical Bond misogyny is in full effect, albeit in a “teen” rated kind of way. Sadly, the game lacks the in-on-the-joke irony of the recent Bond films. If it were anyone other than 007, we’d find it all vaguely offensive.