Xbox 360 Review: 007: Quantum of Solace

When the movie was first released, some critics gave it poor reviews saying that most of the action was in the first half hour of the movie, but the rest of the movie was fairly slow. Well, the game did a nice job of keeping the action going for the length of the game. You will typically get more than twice the game time as compared to the movie time. This gave more value to me than the movie did, in my humble opinion.

First off, Quantum of Solace is a first person shooter game, giving the player the ability of seeing all of this action from 007’s point of view. One of the things done well was that Treyarch implemented a decent cover system, allowing Bond to use proper cover throughout the game. This system has been used more and more in other games such as Call of Duty, and it plays well in Quantum. All you have to do is move to any surface such as a side of a door or behind a crate and hit the “A” button. The system even allows you to dash from point of cover to another point by pressing the “A” button again after aiming at the new cover position.

But of course that means that when you move throughout the game, you will likely be moving from cover to cover. At some points this may get in the way of the flow of the game, while in others, it makes sense in an FPS. I personally like using this kind of system in order to keep the odds in my favor. You see, if you sneak up behind an enemy guard and pop him off in the head with a silencer, you will not face an alarm being raised and twenty more guards rushing to his aid. This low profile system allowed me to be a little sneakier.

But then there will still be those moments where you are left with no other alternative but to fight off wave after wave of enemy horde. Or as in one case, a very obnoxious helicopter. But even these situations are a lot of fun and will definitely keep most shooter fans on their toes as the enemy can come from just about anywhere. And the enemy AI is not too bad either, as most of the time they will do the smart thing like shoot at Bond and take cover. Though sometimes they will still stupidly run from cover to get at you and make themselves pretty easy targets. With other things like that pesky helicopter, it tended toward a set pattern and made reading it and shooting it down only a matter of timing.

One of the biggest problems with this kind of game is that often times the developer is stuck in a time crunch in getting the game out in time for the film. And quite often that shows in the quality of the game. However, Quantum of Solace did not have that feel to it. It felt more like Treyarch had time and did the job to their more exacting standards. Okay, they do have COD4 standards to fall back on. But they also worked hard not to make Quantum look like COD4 with different NPCs.

Quantum of Solace also looked good graphically for the most part. The Daniel Craig Bond really was put together well in my opinion. I was also pleased with the environments and how the details all came together fairly well. And as I said, the NPC AI was well done, but why did almost every enemy character look the same? The answer to this would of course be the time constraints, but this didn’t always take away from the game. Only when you noticed it. Then you might notice that often times they will also act the same as well. Unfortunately that did get a little old after a while.

There are some great firefights in Quantum, and with that, in the typical Bond 007 style, will more often be some great targets to set off some great explosions. But unfortunately those were not as realistic as they were like you might see in a Naruto cartoon. Though I would still have liked to have seen more destructibility. It was pretty easy to tell what could be destroyed and what couldn’t just by looking. Oh well.

The sounds were actually very well done as was the voice acting and cut scenes. But again, when you have a movie to work with, this makes this just a bit easier. By listening to it, you would swear that you were watching the movie.

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There are also some decent multiplayer offerings in Quantum of Solace. Okay, it is much the standard offering for the 007 games. There’s a game where two teams must keep their Bond VIP alive, another where there is all bad-guys against one Bond, and of course the Golden Gun mode. The cool thing about the multiplayer for the most part was the community. Great people playing pretty consistently. And as usual, the multiplayer does increase the replay-ability of any game.

For the most part, Quantum of Solace is a decent game that will give most players 4-5 hours of single player action and more hours of multiplayer action. It looks good doing it too for the most part. It may not be the best Bond game to date, but it is a winner for the most part and is worth the buy. The only real unfortunate issue behind Quantum of Solace is the timing in which it was released. There are a lot of great games being released at the same time, and many people will choose one of those higher-profile games to a more simple 007 title. Well, if you have the means, add this to your wish list and check it out. I don’t think you will be too disappointed.

Overall Score: 8.0 (out of 10)

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