Agent Under Fire
Well, Agm wanted me to start uploading my old reviews, which I was going to do until I realized most of them sucked. Therefore, I have gone back and fixed them to make them not be so sucky.
This review is for Agent Under Fire by EA for the Gamecube. After the release of the first decent Bond game after Goldeneye, I would be lying if I didn’t say my expectations were considerably high going into this game. However, I don’t think my expectations would have really changed the fact that the game was rather disappointing. Read on to see why!
Name: Agent Under Fire
Game Ownership: Yes
Game Status: Defeated last level. Got all Platinum awards. Got all cheats and multiplayer skins.
How it was Acquired: Bought it
Condition when Bought: New
Game Type: Shoot em Up (First Person)
Preliminary Comments:
Rant: This game makes me sad.
Rant: Why do I have to walk like an old man up every staircase or slope!?
Graphics - 7.0
Graphics are pretty average. Things such as backgrounds and scenery look pretty good, but they have a severe lack of interaction. I wish I could at least have the ability to blow up a computer or something like in the The World Is Not Enough, the preceeding EA Bond Game. Why they chose to take a step back with environment interaction is beyond me.
Character models in the game are disappointing. I know that they weren’t allowed to use the actual actor’s likenesses in making the game, but they could have done a much better job than the finished products. The original characters like Bloch and Malprave looked decent, but the most important character in the game, James Bond himself, looks horrible. For those of you that haven’t seen it, imagine the result of Late Night with Conan ‘O Brien’s “If They Mated” between Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan. That’s what Bond in this game would look like.
On the animation front, there is evidence of laziness all over this game. For instance, when enemies get shot, they barely flinch. Normally the enemy would hold the part of the body that just got shot or at least acknowledge that they had just been shot with a gun by moving back a little, but enemies look like you’re just pushing them with a gust of air until they lose their balance and fall down. Not only that, but this game has some of the worst death animations ever. Some of them look like they’re doing ballerina twirls and karate kicks while dying. For the developer to screw up such an important animation like character death in a FPS shows total ineptitude. Another problem with the game are the way bullets are displayed. Normally when you shoot a gun, you see the bullet for a split second before it hits something. In this game, you can see the bullets actually moving away. It’s almost like the game is in a pseudo-bullet time mode where you can clearly see everything that is moving. I have no idea why the developers made bullets travel as slowly as they did. It really screwed up the feel of the game.
Probably the only thing that I can slightly praise are the cinema scenes. They use the in-game models and look pretty nice. Unfortunately, a lot of these cinema scenes are boring due to the lame story that they are supposed to enact.
Sound - 5.0
I remember when TWINE came out and I complained how it didn’t have the James Bond theme in it. Now, they’ve fixed that problem. They’ve DEFINITELY fixed that problem. It seems like this game didn’t have any music that didn’t have the James Bond theme mixed in somewhere. You hear it so many times in so many ways that you just want to brutally murder Monty Norman. Not only that, but most of the music has a pretty low volume, and none of the tracks are memorable.
Sound effects are probably the worst aspect of sound in the game. You’d expect that the guns in a shooter, even a low-grade shooter, would have at least some decent sound effects, but to no avail. Even the sound of bullets hitting a wall just sounds like someone putting a penny in an empty soda can and jingling it around. Probably the only decent sound effects in the game are explosions. Unfortunately, the explosion sound effect has a habit of not being played at random times in the game. Half the time, you have no idea if something exploded because either the sound effect doesn’t play right, or it sounds really muffled. This happens frequently in multiplayer, where explosions are never heard.
Story - 4.0
The story was dreadful. This being the first Bond game not based on a movie, EA was forced to make something new. The thing about EA is if you give them a past story to work off of, they can churn it back out pretty well. If you ask them to make up a whole new story, they just don’t know what the heck they’re doing. The story was so badly constructed that you have no idea what the enemy’s objectives are until the last level. From what I could gather, there’s some evil corporation that is secretly making clones that wants to replace all the world leaders with said clones to rule the world. I’d at least want to give it points for originality, but how many times have we heard the replace-with-clones bit? At least if the plot was a little more developed then it would be decent, but it’s so rushed that it has no meaning.
Fun - 7.5
The game’s single player missions has some nice variety to them. They aren’t all strictly first-person shooter levels. Some of them are rail shooters (the game moves for you, but you just aim at stuff) and are pretty fun to play. Others actually involve driving in a car and using those famous weapons and armaments that adorn 007’s car to accomplish the mission. Those levels are probably the most well done in the game since the car controls very nicely. Of course, EA also made the Need for Speed series, so they should know a thing or two about this sort of thing.
Unfortunately, the missions that they fail to make are the most important ones, first-person shooting. One of the problems is that the objectives are fairly stupid. Two objectives in one level were getting a card off a desk, then going to a computer that was in the room next door to the card. Another problem is that there was a lack of enemies in the game. The evil enemy corporation must be going through a bit of a fiscal shock since a lot of the rooms or halls only have one guard patroling them. Combine this with the previously mentioned static environments and you can see that a lot of the levels are pretty boring. Not only that, but there is absolutely no chance to explore any of these levels. There are never any extra rooms with more enemies or extra equipment that you could find to make the game more fun. Not only that, but the mission stays the same no matter what difficulty level you put it on. The only thing that changes is that the enemies do more damage. Every level is just the same string of events with the same objectives and the same enemies in the same places. These FPS missions get so incredibly boring that there is no real point to play them again except to get all the cheats.
Probably the only good thing about the FPS missions (though the rail and car levels have this too) are the “Bond Moves.” A Bond Move is when you do something unnecessarily flashy like James Bond would do such as shoot an exploding barrel to kill a bunch of guys instead of shooting the guys or using your grappling hook to get to a balcony instead of using the ladder right next to you. It adds a little bit of coolness to the game and the little snippet of the James Bond theme that plays when you accomplish one is fulfilling, but the problem is that all of these Bond Moves are at preset places in the level. After you find out where all of them are, they get old fast.
On every level, you get a ranking for how you did (taking into account things like how much ammo was wasted or what difficulty it was on). If you beat the target score, you unlock something such as unlimited ammo for your gun or something in multiplayer. The scoring system does keep the game interesting for a while, but after you beat the target scores, you really can’t get much higher, nor is there any reason to since you would have already gotten the cheat for the level. The scoring system does not raise the replay value in this case.
Something that EA Bond games have in common is a pretty good multiplayer. Even though the multiplayer in this game isn’t as fun as the one in TWINE, it’s still good enough to have some fun in (at least they finally took out that stupid “good guys can’t kill other good guys” rule). However, the multiplayer is more limited here than in TWINE in that there aren’t that many good weapons to use and there are very few characters availible. I do like how you can use gadgets in the game like grapple or the Q-Jet, but that’s about the only cool distinguishing aspect about the multiplayer. The levels in multiplayer aren’t really that great either. I do like some like that giant dock place, but the othes are incredibly lame.
Difficulty - 3.0
I beat the main game in seven hours. I got all the awards two days after that and unlocked all the cheats and extra stuff for multiplayer. I’ve never been able to do that in any gun game ever in that amount of time. It’s sickening, really.
Replayable - 2.0
It’s single player is lacking and the story is shallow. A redeeming factor might be it’s multiplayer, but there are many other gun games made by now that totally blow this game away. Heck, there were games made before this one that blow it away! If you’ve got 10 bucks, and you just can’t wait to waste on something, then go ahead and get this game. If not, you can probably get a slightly more decent game for the same price, like Goldeneye: Rogue Agent..
