ore than three years after Rare dropped the 007 gauntlet with
GoldenEye, Electronic Arts has returned James Bond to the front lines
with its own first-person shooter, The World Is Not Enough. Like Rare’s
GoldenEye, EA’s game is made up of 14 levels
loosely based on the movie, and like that earlier game, it builds on the
film.
In one case, instead of merely picking up Sir Robert King’s money in a
Spanish bank, Bond must steal the cash from the bank’s vault, erase the
videotape record of his activities, and escape--all without killing any of
the guards. In an entirely new scene, Bond must track King’s assassin into
the London Underground and defuse a bomb.
Each level has three difficulty settings carried over from
GoldenEye--agent, special agent and 007 agent--which correspond to
easy, medium and hard. Completing an easier setting unlocks a harder one;
completing one level unlocks the next.
Bond’s armory includes his trusty PPK pistol, assorted light and heavy
automatic weapons, a sniper rifle and a wristwatch capable of firing
tranquilizer darts as well as tasers. The Q-Lab provides the usual spy
gadgets--cameras, modems, safe crackers and data scramblers--as well as a
few unusual ones, like X-ray glasses and wristwatch-mounted grappling hooks.
The single-player version is complemented by a multiplayer mode that allows
users to battle their way through the game’s different levels. There are
several multiplayer specific levels, as well as more than a half-dozen
scenario types like “Capture the Flag” and “King of the Hill." It also has a
“Golden Gun” scenario, in which players must collect several “golden” items
in order to find the “golden gun,” a one-shot, one-kill weapon.
Players will be shaken and stirred
Rare’s GoldenEye was a ground-breaking shooter, and easily one of the
best games on the Nintendo 64. Its first-rate graphics, excellent gameplay
and myriad extras made it a game that could be played for years. It
also made it a difficult game to top.
EA’s The World Is Not Enough plays well, and its levels pack the same
kind of objective-based action that GoldenEye had, with new goals
being assigned as players advance through the difficulty ranks. There are
many small but nice improvements to the game as well. In the pre-mission
briefing stage, players can look at an intelligence screen showing what
friends and foes they’ll be dealing with, and during missions they can
easily access Bond’s gadgets with a few controller clicks. Even cooler is
the Bond watch, which is finally useful; players should enjoy
shocking enemies into submission with its taser.
But the game has its drawbacks. The graphics, even with the Nintendo 64’s memory
expansion pack, aren’t as smooth as those in GoldenEye or Rare’s own
sequel of sorts, Perfect Dark. The game is nowhere near as
customizable as Perfect Dark--the multiplayer modes are locked to
certain groups of weapons, and while the game offers eight different controller
configurations, not one of them allows the user to change the fire button.
The artificial intelligence of the enemies is simplistic, with little of the
evasion or sidestepping that characterizes the competition’s bad guys.
The Electronic Arts designers have done their best to equal Rare’s earlier
success. In the end, they created a game that rivals GoldenEye, but
it can’t beat Perfect Dark.
