by Matthew Caverhill

Created on: December 24, 2009

There are a long line of bad games based on great movie franchises, most of which are not worth the money you'd likely pay to purchase them from a bargain bin. 007: Everything or Nothing however stands in stark contrast to that legacy of failure. In fact, I would be willing to say that it is the best James Bond game since Goldeneye.

I know that is a powerful statement, but it is the truth.

The game starts off strong by utilizing the talents of Pierce Brosnan, Dame Judi Dench and John Cleese to their best advantage, and then added Willem Dafoe, Heidi Klum, Shannon Elizabeth and singer Mya (who also performed the title track) to the mix, along with a very popular Bond villain/henchman.

With that talent in place, those involved also created a script that was suspenseful and perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the movie series, including a precredit Bond stunt sequence. There are many other stunts which would have been perfectly at home on celluloid (For instance, I remember a playable sequence where Bond jumped from a cliff in a bid to try to save a falling damsel before she hit the rocks below). The cutscenes are also well-executed and really help keep the story moving and they never seem like they are so long that they interfere with the flow of the game in most cases. In essence, the producers created a Bond film that didn’t exist, and one which is arguably better than some of the latter installments of the Brosnan Bond films, as well as being tied to other films in the series. 

Now, some may argue that the move from the first person perspective to the third hurt the immediacy of the action, but I think it allowed the gameplay to have a little more freedom, and made using gadgets and such easier, and it makes looking around the environment a little easier, which given the size of some of the levels and the many ways you can attack them, this perspective seems like almost a necessity.

Of course, there is more to this game than just the shooting action. After all, what would a Bond movie/game be without a romp or three in the classiest of cars, and knowing the Q branch, you know the vehicle is full of all kinds of toys, so even at their most frustrating, these missions are still fun. Of course, the game also winks at Goldeneye by having a couple of tank driving sequences, and there is a helicopter mission as well, so there is some variety between missions.

In terms of difficulty, I found the game to be manageable. There

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