Dom Robinson reviews

for Xbox

Distributed by
EA Games

You're thrust into the action early on as the opening scene comes to an end with the Prime Minister's daughter having been kidnapped and now you're right into the game. A nice start to the proceedings although, these days, who'd care even if the Prime Minister himself was in danger when he's such a dick? As stated, Bond is voiced by the original spy, Sean Connery, but because he's now 42 years older this does show in the sound of his voice. However, he does deliver the lines with some of the same usual panache which still made me chuckle. And as I started to get into it, I noticed some nice touches like shooting the priceless antiques and when you die, the blood pours down the screen like on the opening titles of a Bond movie. In fact, getting into the game is something that's very easy to do. There's nothing massively complex to get your head round and even when you come across something new, like a move to pull off or the ability to rappel up and abseil down steep sections, the game pauses briefly to tell you how. Initially, this was assisted with Bond's fast, fluid movement, but while the framerate was good early on, some scenes do find it slightly jerky, which is a bit frustrating.

From Russia With Love has great music in the background, nicely intuitive controls, Thunderball's jetpacks and some nice hand-to-hand combat when you get up close and personal with a baddie, which earns you extra bonus points and as you progress you'll find you can Unlock bonus missions, hidden costumes and gain upgrade points to get better weaponry and extra ammo. More importantly, first impressions are that this is fun! I like the pseudo-cinemascope look to the in-game cut-scenes (which are anamorphic, although the opening segment and the titles are letterbox. It really should detect the widescreen first and adjust appropriately, like the film does. And the film's theatrical ratio was 1.85:1, not 2.35:1 Cinemascope :) It's also nice to test your rear speaker sounds in Dolby Digital 5.1 by moving Bond so he shoots behind you to your left and right, not to mention the additional explosions all around which will make a lot of noise and annoy the neighbours... Weird-faced singer Natasha Bedingfield also appears as Elizabeth Stark, but I'd rather have Eliza Szonert who played Neighbours' Danni Stark ;)

There are a few niggles to the proceedings though. Firstly, the map in the top-right corner of the screen isn't always very helpful as it only highlights the occasional item or location to be found, not the position of the enemies as they creep about, for example, the hedgemaze in level 2. Also, the targeting occasionally jumps between two baddies when they're both in the same room. Bit of a pain, this, for the obvious reasons. And in this game version, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. is renamed Octopus - presumably a copyright issue but since MGM's logo is there in the game credits, what's the deal? It also doesn't strictly follow the plot of the original film either, so presumably they rewrote things to make the game more interactive since there weren't a massive number of gadgets in the movie. You also can't save during a level. When I went to save for the second time, despite there originally being four save slots available, by default it wanted me to save over the first one. I said no and it just went on to the next level, not giving me a chance to save before having to complete the next level! Overall, From Russia With Love is fun for a few hours but the sections are rather easy on the default setting and don't take you long to get through them, partly down to the simplicity of what's required of you. I'll continue to the end to see how things pan out, and apparently it's not that long a game anyway, but while there's nothing particularly revolutionary to the game it's still miles better than many things you could buy in its place.

GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC PLAYABILITY ENJOYMENT
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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2005.