While
007 Legends’s approach is a nice change from most Bond games, it just doesn’t seem like a deep enough experience. Each film last a couple of levels, and while you might feel like you are taking a lot of time to get through some enemy’s secret base, once it’s done, I found I often felt like the level was short and didn’t have a lot in it.
007 Legends takes you through the plots of Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill, Die Another Day and Moonraker and while the highlights of each film are firmly hit, I never really got the feeling that I was the suave MI6 agent who not only knew how to wield a gun, but also play some games of cat and mouse, both with the story’s bad guy and the femme fatale. Sure, Bond has weapons and cool gadgets, though his particular selection this time around is fairly limited, but there is so much more to him than just that, and that feeling just doesn’t come through in 007 Legends.
What it does have is a lot of gun play. 007 Legends boasts a healthy variety of weapons and an upgrade system that gives you the ability to customize those weapons to your liking, but more on that later. There are also three gadgets at Bond’s disposal. A watch that not only sings out a sonar ping to identify where people are around you, but it can also send out a beam that causes some objects to overheat. This is good for taking out cameras or causing some objects to squawk and distract guards. Another is your cell phone that can be used to take pictures, scan the electromagnetic frequency (in order to sleuth out hidden panels and switches) as well as a mode that lets you see and scan fingerprints, which is great for getting past doors locked by keypads. The last gadget is a pen that shoots out darts. These will either put their target to sleep, electrocute it, or cause a noise to be emitted, again for distracting guards.
In case you haven’t guessed yet, there is a good bit of stealth in 007 Legends, a bit more than past games. Most of the areas that require some sneaking around can be gotten through with guns ablaze, but you will have to take down more enemies than you would otherwise. But not every stealth area can be gotten through with bullets, and if you don’t get a good handle on being quiet, you will find yourself repeating those areas a lot … which wouldn’t be so bad if the load times between failed missions were shorter. As it is, each failed attempt, regardless of the situation really, ends up being a bit more tiresome as you spend an inexcusable amount of time waiting to get back into the game. I found this especially true during the first part of On Her Majesty's Secret Service where I not only had to ski my way down a mountain, but take out enemy forces and not hit a tree or get shot up myself.
007 Legends offers a variety of multiplayer modes, but I don’t believe there is anything new to the license this time around. There are some basic variations on Deathmatch modes, some King of the Hills and the like, but nothing you wouldn’t expect to see in most other modern first person shooters.
