James Bond 007: Quantum of Solace (Xbox 360)

Quantum of Solace is the first Bond game to be released on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 and I was hoping for quite a lot as I loved the classic Bond games that were for the old PS2.

It has been designed by Activision and features a very similar control system and the same graphics engine (apparently) that was used in the very successful Call of Duty 4 but also has some great new features that make the game play very enjoyable. Although ...
...good 3rd person cover system which allows you to blind fire from cover, a lot like the system on Gears of War. Also when near an enemy instead of knifing them or hitting them with your weapon you can perform stylish takedowns by pressing a few buttons. Although this is only in the campaign not online.

The campaign features scenes from both Casino Royal and Quantum of Solace although they are jumbled up and quite hard to follow but it ... more

Quantum of Solace is the first Bond game to be released on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 and I was hoping for quite a lot as I loved the classic Bond games that were for the old PS2.

It has been designed by Activision and features a very similar control system and the same graphics engine (apparently) that was used in the very successful Call of Duty 4 but also has some great new features that make the game play very enjoyable. Although it is a first person game it has a very good 3rd person cover system which allows you to blind fire from cover, a lot like the system on Gears of War. Also when near an enemy instead of knifing them or hitting them with your weapon you can perform stylish takedowns by pressing a few buttons. Although this is only in the campaign not online.

The campaign features scenes from both Casino Royal and Quantum of Solace although they are jumbled up and quite hard to follow but it is a lot better than a lot of movie games where you are doing things that never actually happened in the movie. There are quite a lot of different weapons and what is really great is that you can put silencers on a lot of guns anytime during the campaign. So you can be very stealthy and remain undetected for a lot of missions. If you can do this it makes the levels a lot easier as you do not have to fight so many people at once. Also some of the levels are designed for you to be stealthy for example in some of the levels if you are detected a tactical response team will be sent out to eliminate you making it significantly hardly to survive. There are some very good fight scenes where you will be watching Bond fighting and at certain times you will have to press the buttons that come up on the screen to win the fight. If you press the wrong one you will be finished off very stylishly by your opponent and have to try again from the beginning. During the campaign you will have to pick locks occasionally and there is a very cool system using the D-pad where you have to press the arrow that flashes green on the screen. You have three chances to mess up and how long it lasts depends on the difficulty of the lock. The lock picking screen is very nicely done with numbers flashing everywhere and each time you press the buttons at the right time a number will appear in a series of boxes to form the code that will unlock the door. This gives a very good feel to the game. You can patch into cameras during parts of the campaign to see what’s coming up next which is very useful if you’re going for the stealthy approach. Another good feature of this game is that you can change the fire mode of certain guns from single shot, Burst and automatic to suit your style of game play. During large fire fights you will often find that there is a way round just shooting and if you look carefully there is quite often a explosive nearby that you could shoot to take down a couple of enemies. It has four difficulty setting, New Recruit, Field operative, Agent and 007. New Recruit is very easy and anyone who had never touched a games console in their life could do it. However if you put it on the highest difficulty level it is very challenging. I was a bit disappointed that there were no driving missions like on the old Bond games, the Aston Martins with missile launchers attached to them were great fun to use. Overall it is a great campaign with superb game play, although the storyline is a bit hard to follow, and is quite a good length.

The online game play is excellent, there are lots of match types and they aren’t just the standard team death matches. These include games like “Golden gun” where you have to get the golden gun, by killing whoever has it, and get as many kills using it as possible. The Person with the most kills using the Golden gun wins. In another game mode one person plays as bond and has to defuse bombs and 5 other people have to defend the bombs. This sounds hard but as bond you have more health and do more damage than the people defending it. You earn points buy doing matches and you can purchase new weapons, grenades and gadgets (like the perks on Cod 4) with these points. There is an ok selection of weapons, side arms and gadgets although not as many as on Cod 4 or Rainbow Six Vegas 2. Also there are weapon attachments like scopes and silencers you can buy for your weapons. There are several different maps to play online although they lack the detail of the maps on CoD 4 they are still quite good to play.

Overall this is a very well put together game with a lot of excellent new features which makes the game very enjoyable to play. You can now get a copy for around £20 so it is well worth buying.

 

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