REVIEW - 007: The World Is Not Enough | N64 | 2000

GENRE(S): FPS / Action
RELEASED: October 17, 2000
AVAILABLE ON: N64
DEVELOPER(S): Eurocom Developments
PUBLISHER(S): EA

Due to poor reception to EA's third-person shooter based on Tomorrow Never Dies, they went back to the golden roots of Rare and Nintendo's GoldenEye 007 with The World Is Not Enough, ordering two slightly different versions of the game for the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. Although they had all the resources to work and improve on what was truly wrong about the successful GoldenEye, such as control issues, they ended up wasting them on things the target group didn't need. Basing the game on a crappy movie didn't help.

GoldenEye was enough

STARRING
Tim Bentinck : James Bond
David Robb : Renard
Sumalee Montano : Elektra King
Caron Pascoe : Dr. Christmas Jones
Henrietta Bass : Moneypenny
Miles Anderson : R
Adam Blackwood : Valentin Zukovsky
Andrew Burt : Sir Robert King
Beatie Edney : Dr. Natalya Damescu
Tim Whitnall : Davidov

British oil tycoon Sir Robert King is killed by a terrorist named Renard, who is planning to trigger a nuclear meltdown in Istanbul. 007 is tasked with thwarting Renard's plans, as well as keeping King's beautiful daughter Elektra safe from harm.

I simply hated this movie. It was wholly placed on Pierce Brosnan's shoulders and went back to the staleness which plagued the franchise from time to time up until Licence to Kill. The staleness wouldn't be that bad if we had a less stale guy than Pierce Brosnan for a lead. George Lazenby was boring, but he only did one movie, which had a good script. Timothy Dalton was a douche, but he had at least one damn good script to back him up during his short stint. GoldenEye had a good script. Here we have a stale, boring script, with a boring lead. Ehhh. Well, at least it had two extremely beautiful women for Bond girls... or one truly beautiful woman who seems to age like wine, and one who now looks like a dumpster fire. What happened to Denise Richards, seriously?

The Shining, Part 2: Danny's Got a Gun.

The game looks better than GoldenEye 007, but not really all that much. Besides, the level design is not nearly as inspired. The soundtrack is once again missing the theme song, which is replaced by dozens of unmemorable stock tunes from the "Action/Adventure" drawer.

In a statement eerily reminiscent of the development of the movie franchise, The World Is Not Enough is a very uninspired game; everything good about it is ripped straight off GoldenEye, and the rest is out of place. Sure, I like having my objectives told to me straight instead of having to dig them up from a menu - that's what I was complaining about the last time. I just wish there'd be less than a million of them at once, and I also wish most of them wouldn't be some blatant make-believe that this would be anything more or less than a first-person shooter. Fetch this, fetch that, talk to this guy, talk to that guy... it's all just for a formulaic, cinematic value. We came here to shoot people. Not suffer through boring games of unarmed fetch if they're for nothing but pushing the story forward. People can go and see the movie for that, this is supposed to be a game. A smooth, consistent one. Regardless of the genre, consistency matters.

Since EA's The World Is Not Enough is such a carbon copy of Rare's GoldenEye 007, with crappy attempts at "extra gameplay features" and generic level design, I don't know what else to say about the game. It doesn't even feel like a Bond game, unlike its "predecessor", more like some stock, run-of-the-mill spy-themed FPS. Sure, it's still a decent game, but its out-of-place, random adventure game elements just make me angry, as well as EA's disregard for improving controls and other truly significant issues.

UPS
+ GoldenEye 007 revisited
+ Full voice track, and it's well performed... no reprisals at all, though

DOWNS
- Out-of-place elements which are supposed to create depth and an illusion of a first-person adventure; instead they're just boring, linear, failsafe sequences, which have to repeated on every single try and playthrough
- Not much improvements in areas which would've needed them - except for mission objectives showing up a bit more clearly
- Flat, uninspired level design, which pales in comparison to the predecessor's occasionally confusing, but well and ultimately logically built levels
- Crappy movie, and unfortunately, a lot more of it than necessary is recreated for the game

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