Quantum of Solace Hands-on Preview

Your Eyes Only

As the game goes on, these changes tend to increase in regularity and severity and the Train level for example quickly moves on from Bond just shooting out a few enemies to a full on car-decoupling, mass-murdering gunfest that strangely not once gives the guard reason enough to pull the emergency brake.

The changes are spread through the game too, not just limited to a small number of levels.

Take the scene in the Science Museum from Casino Royale for example. In the film Bond goes here because he is tailing a lone suspect who is about to make a drop and give instructions to a bomber accomplice. This then leads into an airport chase where we have cars, guns and a Richard Branson cameo.

In the game however, it’s a lot different. Bond doesn’t simply tail his suspect in and have an incredibly quiet and tense knife-fight with him. Instead he sets himself up on the opposite roof and takes to sniping all the guards first before storming the alleyways and making an entrance at the back of the building where mercenaries have set up spotlights manned by many, many more guards.


The level then ends with Bond entering the exhibition proper and going toe-to-toe with a veritable army of ski-mask wearing men, none of whom we think are likely to be skiing instructors.

The troublesome bit though is that it’s really hard to know how we feel about this approach to the game as there are two equally weighted sides to the coin. On the one hand, yes, these segments massively disconnect from the plot of the film and it’s as hard to reconcile the two as it is to seriously insist that Roger Moore was the best James Bond.

The other side of that argument though is that, well, it’d be a pretty dull game without them and if you aren’t going to move away from the source material at least a little then you may as well make an interactive DVD instead.

Unfortunately, when the singleplayer experience is fully weighted and measured we find ourselves tipping over to former anti-violent argument. It’s not an easy choice to make admittedly and we fell over to that side slower than a drunk cow, but that’s how we see it.


In the end, the straw that broke our backs proved to be the small minigames that are incorporated into the story. As Treyarch told us when we sat down with them briefly, the new Bond isn’t very gadget driven and (thankfully) doesn’t have John Cleese’s Q to back him up, but he is familiar with technology. He can pick electronic locks and hack computers and so forth, so in-game this becomes silly minigames.

Had these minigames been handled a little differently, similar to the lockpicking in Thief: Deadly Shadows perhaps, or simply become a time-based activity like in Deus Ex then it might have been forgiveable. As it is, it’s like the pipe-fixing in BioShock or the decryption in Mass Effect PC, except not presented as well. It feels random, clunky and uninspired. Why couldn’t they just let us shoot the locks off and leave it at that?

It also has to be pointed out that there’s a fairly big disconnect here not just between how the game plays and how the film looked, but also when it comes to the graphics. Quantum of Solace is built on an expanded Call of Duty 4 engine and the faces of the characters are all mapped using the latest laser technology.

That’s all well and good, but when you get in game the characters definitely don’t always look right. Vesper Lynd especially looks like a beaten up version of her own beautiful self, her animations in the train sequence wobblier than if she was in the middle of being resuscitated underwater.