PixlBit

Bizarre Creations, creative minds behind the Project Gotham series, Blur, and The Club, have put together their talents to create the latest video game based on James Bond. A combination of third person shooting and intense car chase sequences, James Bond 007: Blood Stone is a wholly original story involving the international spy from MI6. The game is undoubtedly in the upper-echelon of Bond experiences, but its quality is all over the board, ranging from spectacular to yawn-inducing.

Things really start off with a bang for Blood Stone. The story begins with M in Athens attempting to convince a local official about cancelling a photograph to avoid a terrorist attack. The official refuses to believe M, forcing 007 to step into the picture. He arrives on a yacht via parachute and players take control from there. Things start stealthy with some sneaking around, picking off enemy guards, but quickly ramp up to flat-out firefights. This culminates with a chase on foot, which escalates to a boat chase, and later, a chase through the city in a car. The entire sequence was incredibly cinematic and enjoyable; it moved fast, the action hit the proper highs, and the vehicle chase sequences were extremely well-executed.

Unfortunately, this mission was proceded by an incredibly boring progression through Istanbul. Being part cover-based third person shooter, the mission amounted to little more than a game of whack-a-mole. Guy pops up, you pop up from cover and whack him; rinse and repeat for an hour plus. It's these parts of the game that truly drag down the entire experience. This isn't to say that the third person shooting is bad - quite the opposite, the mechanics are extremely sound. It's just unbelievably bland to push through a mission based entirely on killing enemies in new areas with boxes strewn about.

Blood Stone truly comes alive in the parts that have players performing other functions. Searching for intelligence and sneaking around is always a joy, and it closely resembles the recent Splinter Cell title, Conviction. As a matter of fact, it's pretty clear that Blood Stone took some direction from that title, though Bond is significantly less adept at the task than Sam Fisher. Nevertheless, performing tasks that don't (necessarily) involve killing folk is a bunch of fun, and only when these parts are accentuated by firefights does the game really prove enjoyable.

Chase sequences of all sorts are universally entertaining. Whether pursuing on-foot or in a vehicle, players will be having a blast. The on-foot pursuits succeed because they involve quick, no-time-to-stop shooting which happens while you are running full speed at a given enemy.

Given Bizarre's experience in the racing genre, they have clearly utilized their abilities in the game's vehicle-based chase sequences. A few particular ones really stand out, namely chasing a train down on road and ice in Siberia while escaping an exploding bioweapons facility, as well as in Thailand when you must chase down an assassin who's tearing apart the city in a giant dump truck. No matter the sequence, the world is extremely dynamic, and as players chase, they will have to make split-second decisions on how to avoid an impediment in the road, typically created by the enemy or their interaction with the environment.

The game's story and presentation also match the quality of the game's chase sequences; I must admit that I was convinced Blood Stone was based on a brand new Bond movie rather than being an entirely new story. Most of the game is expertly choreographed and it's clear that the game could easily be adapted into a movie without much tweaking.

The side effect of having a Bond story that could work as a movie, is that the game is on the short side, clocking in at around 6-8 hours of gameplay in the single player mode. Not much about the game warrants a second playthrough aside from the game's achievements. Multiplayer is pretty standard fare, meaning it has all been done before, and better at that, by games that have preceded it.

A big problem for Blood Stone is that the entire game is unevenly paced. You go from one mission to the next and the pacing never seems to keep up when the game hits its peaks. As a matter of fact, you typically dip into some really low valleys, which makes the problem even worse. Had the game struck a better balance, the less interesting parts of the game wouldn't have stuck out quite as much.

It's a real disappointment that Blood Stone isn't more consistent in its execution. So many parts of the game are intense and enjoyable, but they are buffered with bland whack-a-mole third person shooting segments that do nothing more than add time to the game clock. Going forward, I'd love to see Bizarre refine the concepts found here and wrap up the game's cliffhanger ending in a sequel, because this attempt at the latest in the Bond series nearly hit the mark.