007 Legends review

As the old saying goes, it’s either everything or nothing when it comes to James Bond, but with everyone’s favourite super spy marking his 50th anniversary this year, does Eurocom’s 007 Legends fit the bill as a so-called greatest hits of Bond’s best adventures?

Despite Daniel Craig providing Bond’s likeness throughout, 007 Legends sees you taking up Bond’s classic PP7 in six missions spread across six different films from each Bond era. Over the course of the game, you’ll be recreating iconic scenes from Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Moonraker, License to Kill, Die Another Day, and this year’s hotly anticipated Skyfall (although the latter’s only being released as a free DLC pack on 9th November).

Or at least you will be some of the time, as our hands-on demo first saw us trekking through the rather monotonous corridors of Drax’s Moonraker lab. Our objective was to gain entry to Drax’s office by hacking a fuse box through a small mini-game on Bond’s smartphone, and disabling the plentiful supply of sentry guns lining the maze-like interior.

The gunplay is as you’d expected from any Call of Duty clone, although we were slightly baffled by the option of a sniper rifle in such close quarters. For the most part, though, it’s relatively uninspiring. Enemies swarm you relentlessly if you happen to set off an alarm, and the cover-based combat leaves a lot to be desired as well, making you feel less like 007 and more like a frail, Sean Connery era Bond girl.

There were a few different routes to pick, including sneaking through air vents as opposed to the main corridors, but in the end it didn’t really make much difference. We were found immediately, gunned down, and left with a tedious restart.

For a moment we thought the rinse and repeat gunfights might redeem themselves with a quick-time-event (QTE) based punch-up with one of the head guards, but when the only options we had were tapping up or down on the left or right analogue sticks to give him our best left or right hook (with plenty of time to boot), this too failed to leave us shaken, nor stirred.

Cut to the Goldfinger demo, however, and it all starts to look and feel a bit more like Bond. Navigating our way through one of Goldfinger’s factories, sneaking through enemy lines using fancy gadgets like Bond’s watch laser and his jack-of-all-trades smartphone as well as a few stealth techniques was much more fun. We found it hard to stay hidden for long though, as while enemies supposedly have a specific line of sight, there’s no way to tell how far they can see, and with no option to remove dead bodies either, we were quickly setting off alarms left, right and centre.

This thrust us straight back into shooter mode, but the set pieces here felt much bigger and brassier, David Arnold and Kevin Kiner’s music more urgent and involving, and it really made an effort to recapture that classic sense of scale the Bond movies have become so well known for.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to play its multiplayer mode, but we were told it would feature both online and 4-player split-screen options. The MI6 Ops missions will also make a return from Eurocom’s previous Bond game, GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, but this time they’ll be used to flesh out other parts of the films that we didn’t necessarily get to see, such as playing as Tracy Draco’s father from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as he escorts his daughter to safety.

With so many Bond games having been doomed to die another day in the past, it’s unclear whether 007 Legends will truly rank among the greater entries in Bond’s virtual outings like Rare’s original GoldenEye 007 and EA’s 007: Everything or Nothing in 2004, but from what we’ve seen so far it looks like it will at least pass its licence to kill, if only just.