007: Racing

The Good
The idea. Car models look decent. Licensed music.

The Bad
The graphics. The controls and the game mechanics.

The Bottom Line
This is a typical example of a good game idea gone wrong. The idea is: take a popular movie license, mix it with popular cars licenses and do an action packed, cinematic game filled with some breathtaking scenes like long car jumps and duels with helicopters. The problem is – it just doesn’t work here. Although a licensed product the game isn’t your typical summer vacation movie tie-in. It isn’t associated with any particular Bond movie, although it’s centered around Pierce Brosnan era. So the developers can’t explain themselves with typical excuses – lack of time and resources because of a fixed movie opening date. At first everything looks ok – you have your mission objectives which are pretty varied from level to level. The graphics is really bad (at the year 2000 we saw how a PSX title could look), but you could forget about it because of original movie music which nicely sets the atmosphere. But the controls and the mechanics is what really kill this one. The cars are sluggish and slow and the constant need to line with your targets in order to shoot them really starts to annoy you and makes you think that it would have been much better if you could just walk out of the car and shoot in a typical fpp fashion. Mainly you move in narrow paths and the game doesn’t even try to generate an illusion of a world to explore. And a completely unbelievable physics makes one of the essential aspects – jumping – a trial and error which is especially frustrating because every fall results in a restart at the beginning.