By Electronic Arts for Playstation

First-person shooters (FPS) generally don’t do well on the Playstation. I’m not sure why this is, since the system was designed for 3D games. I guess it has something to do with the processing power involved in animating and tracking several polygonal models through large areas. Medal of Honor was pretty good, though, and after my initial negative reaction to The World is Not Enough (TWINE), I’ve come to the conclusion that this latest Bond game isn’t all bad, either.

We’ll get the bad stuff out of the way first. Like Medal of Honor, TWINE suffers from some serious slowdown when heavy gunplay starts up. I suppose this is to be expected. However, even more disturbingly, the game sometimes grinds to a syrupy-slow pace for no apparent reason at all, in areas with no enemies. This gives the game an unnatural feel – Bond’s movement at any given moment ranges from fairly fast and smooth to slow and clunky.

Also the game, especially in the later levels, tends to be made tedious through the use of "instant-failure" events. One level in particular stands out in my mind. The mission starts out simply enough – you spend the first five or ten minutes wandering around an underground base, showing your fake I.D. to guards to gain access to new areas; very similar to the undercover levels in Medal of Honor. However, about halfway through the level, you’re hit with a big gunfight sequence which contains no fewer than three "instant-fail" events. The Denise Richards character, Dr. Jones, runs crazily through a large room in which enemies appear out of thin air, firing away. She runs into the path of bullets, she runs in front of you if you’re in the wrong spot, and if she gets killed (which she seems determines to do, it’s game over). Next you enter a long hallway broken into sections by huge blast doors. Let one of them close ahead of you and it’s game over. Even worse, sometimes the game doesn’t realize that you’ve moved to this new area, and you’ll be treated to the message that Dr. Jones has been killed back in the first area. Finally, near the end of the level, you have about five seconds to figure out that you must manually aim your grappling hook at the ceiling and hit a small red box before the room explodes, killing you instantly. It’s cheap tricks like these, obviously thrown in by lazy designers to lengthen the playing time (every time you fail the mission you have to restart from the beginning and go through all the I.D. badge busywork again) that cost otherwise good games points on my rating scale.

Looking past these flaws, though, you’ll find that TWINE is a straight FPS with a few innovative twists (stealth missions which have you bugging phones and the clever casino mission where you must earn $100,000 playing Blackjack come to mind).

Graphically, there’s nothing overly special here. I was turned off by the visuals immediately, mainly because I’m used to playing games like this on my PC, and TWINE just doesn’t compare to the graphical splendor of even the more average PC shooters. But, considering that comparisons to PC games were unfair, I decided that TWINE’s presentation really isn’t bad. In fact, the weapons are modeled fairly well, as are the enemies, who sometimes react realistically to your attacks (of course, there are other times when they run in circles or get suck on walls, but who’s keeping track?

The sound effects are pretty good, as well, except perhaps for Bond’s voice – he sounds like he’s talking through clenched teeth and perhaps suffering a bit of constipation.

If you only own a PS, and you really want a first-person shooter, then TWINE is probably you’re best choice right now. It’s not a long game, and there doesn’t seem to be any multiplayer mode (probably a good thing after Medal of Honor’s poor 2-player showing), but it does provide some good, brainless shooting action, and we all need a little of that every now and again, right Senator Joe? Right.

Graphics: 7 (There’s nothing that’ll make your eyes pop, but the graphics are solid enough to do the job)

Sound: 8 (Good weapon effects, and of course Bond music is in full force. Voices could have used a little work – read: they should’ve hired better voice actors)

Gameplay: 7 (Controls are okay if slightly sluggish. Slowdown hampers movement in many key gunfights)

Replay: 6 (There’s not much call to go back through the game after beating it once. Even the extra difficulty settings only seem to affect the enemies.)

Overall: 7 (A solid Playstation FPS, with absolutely no extra trimmings.)