Also available on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Windows When I was taking a nap the other day, I had a dream about the cancelled Goldeneye remaster for Xbox 360. I woke up and thought, "Wow, I wish I could play that on my Xbox. The Goldeneye remake on Wii was just too different. Hey, I've got that one 007 game on my Wii U! I'll play that! It's the next best thing, right?" Well God, I hope it's not the next best thing; if it is, I'd hate to see the worst thing. I played on Wii U, but these screenshots are from the PlayStation 3 version. 007 Legends is intended to be a sort of "best of" James Bond game. Instead of focusing on retelling the story of one specific movie like most of the series, Legends goes through very brief retellings of five James Bond movies (six if you buy the DLC or play on Wii U) - Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Moonraker, License to Kill, Die Another Day, and Skyfall. There are some pros and some cons of this approach. On the one hand, you can get some bite-sized adventures that provide you with the some action and the Spark Notes version of the story, and the varying villains and settings keep the game from getting stale. On the other hand, each mission is over too quickly to really get invested in the story, and it can end up feeling like a quick cash-in; why bother giving a good retelling of one story when you can give a bullet point version of several? Unfortunately, discussion of the game's positive elements is kind of moot because the game is complete rubbish. First, let's talk about the visuals. They're not great. I know the Wii U isn't a power house console, and the game itself was just a ported 360 game, but even for the Xbox 360, this is not a particularly impressive looking game. The character models look very plain, the weapons look bland, and the environments look like they're from a PS2 game and just upscaled. That's not even what makes the game bad, though; there are plenty of games that are graphically lackluster but a ton of fun to play. What truly ruins this game is the controls. There's no option to tweak vertical and horizontal sensitivity separately, and the camera seems to move along the two axes at a 2:1 speed ratio. It seems to me that I should be able to move my cursor to the left about as quickly as I should be able to move it up, but that's not even close to the case here. Not only that, but it's not a smooth feeling movement; it's jerky and horrendously difficult to aim. Fortunately, the ADS target snap-on works pretty well, so you can play by relying on that and aim assist, but you shouldn't have to rely on that to play an FPS game. I've played some games with janky controls, but 007 Legends might take the cake. Goldeneye's controls didn't feel quite this bad, and that controller only had one analog stick. Call of Duy on NGage didn't feel any worse, and that's a literal early 2000s cell phone. 007 Legends is playable thanks to the snap-on aiming, but it's genuinely terrible. It's not even "so bad it's good." It's just bad. I don't recommend this game for anyone. My Rating - D |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
April 2024
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