Bond. James Bond.
That’s exactly what you get when you are playing 007 Blood Stone, the newest release in the 007 franchise which features an all-new original story.
I’m a huge James Bond fan and although I am forever going to be impartial to Goldeneye and it’s present and former game incarnations, I found myself enjoying Blood Stone more than I had enjoyed a James Bond-themed game in recent memory.
However, that isn’t to say that Blood Stone is a great game, because at times it appears to be like Bond’s martini’s, shaken, not stirred.
Story: If you are even remotely familiar with 007 and James Bond, you can pretty much peg the story from the outset. “Bond shoots a ton of people, drives really fast, expensive cars, meets girl, seduces girl, saves world from certain doom, repeat as necessary.”
This time around, Bond is attempting to save the world from a billionaire bio-terrorist who is using British research to turn small-pox and anthrax antidotes into weapons of mass destruction to release upon the rest of the globe. Again, pretty standard stuff. Along the way you meet Nicole Hunter, a socialite who happens to be working for MI6, and she serves as your attractive sidekick (in pixelated form) for the duration of your adventure.
As usual, you get your classic Bond twists and turns, but one thing this game does very well is capture the new essence of Bond, the grittier, reckless, leave-a-path-of-destruction style of Daniel Craig’s portrayal of Ian Fleming’s classic character.
Visuals/Sound: I’m going to group these two portions of the review together simply because they work hand-in-hand with each other. This game truly captures the Bond experience perfectly, and from the outset it seems more like you are in a James Bond movie rather than playing a video game. Activision tapped all of the current Bond talent (Judi Dench, Daniel Craig) for the voice work and used their likenesses in the game. The game also features a classic Bond opening and song that was performed by Joss Stone, who also happens to appear in the game as leading lady Nicole Hunter.
The voicework is phenomenal, and is easily some of the best I’ve heard this year, and the graphics are pretty good, even when things get crazy with explosions and frantic moments in the game. One thing I would have liked to see was some better visuals in the cutscenes, but overall the game is visually pleasing.
The Gameplay: Unfortunately, here is where the game falls off. If you can get over the convoluted control scheme at first the game plays pretty smoothly, but there can be some frustrating moments regardless. There were times where I couldn’t figure out if the developers wanted me to play the game as I would a Gears of War title or if I should take more of a Hitman/Splinter Cell approach to things. Simply put, there seemed to be an identity crisis in play when I was going through Blood Stone. I very rarely found myself overwhelmed by enemies, and they never posed too much of a threat outside of a few select moments. The game did get the Jason Bourne-type takedowns and the bullet-time styled “Focus Aim” down pretty well and they made it feel like you had the skills of the super-trained elite Bond himself.
The use of Bond’s smart phone was a nice inclusion in the game and it worked sort of like Pierce Brosnan’s watch did in the last generation of Bond games, but I would have liked to have seen Activision require you to collect a certain amount of “evidence” with your phone in order to advance through the levels.
The driving sequences, although very fun and very cool, were a bit too scripted for my taste and there were a few parts where I could see gamers becoming frustrated because of an unnecessary level of difficulty (i.e. the harbor chase and the ice chase).
Final Thoughts: Blood Stone is a very enjoyable and fun game to play, granted you can get over the sketchy control scheme and the relatively simple and short single-player campaign. This game’s production value was incredibly high and the developers deserve a good deal of credit for making a title worthy of the Bond license. Would I suggest going out and dropping $60 on this title, no, unless you are a die-hard Bond fan, but it is definitely worth a rent.
Final Grade: C+/B-
Blood Stone is rated T for Teen and is available for Xbox 360, PS3, Nintendo DS and PC.
