You know the name. You know the number. And you also that it was pretty much the swan song for the Pierce Brosnan era of James Bond, just before Daniel Craig came running through a wall making us Pierce who? As a swan song, it's not that bad but it could've been better. Come on, I'll tell you what I mean.
So the plot is like what Bond would do. He first has to save woman scientist...Katya Nadamov(as played by Heidi Klum) for some reason, I forgot what but you don't get have sex with her cause she's EVIL. She's teamed up with Diavolo(as played by Willem Dafoe), who wants vengeance against Bond for Bond killed Max Zorin, you remember him from A View to a Kill...right? Come on, he was played by Christopher Walken! And he dyed his hair ultra-blonde! Anyways, Diavolo was Zorin's student so that's where the vengeance thing comes in. So for some reason you have to go to Peru...wait, I remember the reason, you have to go and find Agent 003 who is investigating Diavolo but he dies since he's not James Bond. Then you go to New Orleans and then back to Peru and finally to Russia to finally stop Diavolo's evil plan to unleash metal-eating nanobots. Oh, and Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker is back as the evil henchman...I don't know why and he's not awesome enough in it to make me not question it. Then there's Shannon Elizabeth and formerly popular R&B singer Mya who are also in it for conquests or something like that.
So it's more like a James Bond movie than most of the James Bond games but with inferior writing and acting, well mostly the writing. Let's start with the obvious, Diavolo. Sure Willem Dafoe amps it up with a fun Russian accent but man is his character extremely cliched. Let's see his evilness: he's Russian, he's megalomaniacal and he's dapper which are the three characteristics to run away from fast. Pierce Brosnan still does fine even though the one-liners do get a bit ridiculous. Judi Dench is pretty much wasted as M were 85% of her dialogue involves the words Bond, stop, not or allow. John Cleese does good...but he's John Cleese so anything he does is good. As for the Bond Girls, well Heidi Klum is a supermodel/host of Project Runway for extremely obvious reasons. Shannon Elizabeth proves why she has no career despite her being hot. Mya.....well she's a former singer who also assaults the gamers ears with the title song. And if you were under the mistaken impression that the "Die Another Day" song was bad...oh boy are you in for a treat.
The game play is pretty good. It's your basic third-person James Bond shooter that doesn't really do anything new or daring with one exception. The hand-to-hand combat is pretty fun. You feel like Bond when you start punching people left and right which is nice. But there is a fatal flaw in this, you punch someone and then you have to pull out your gun which takes a couple seconds and you're probably getting shot at with automatic weapons which isn't fun at all. The driving levels, mostly the motorcycle ones, are really fun though. You get to drive fast and blow things up and make super impossible jumps and really, who doesn't love that.
This game doesn't really do anything wrong, but it doesn't do anything right either. The acting is usually defeated by the weak writing and the game should've been more fun to play. So in the end, it fills a basic need to be James Bond again and it's at least better than Nightfire, but it's no Goldeneye or From Russia with Love.
6/10
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