Accolades for trying to do something a little different for the Eye Toy. It just didn't get executed very well.
Some of the mini games are fun. There's a variety of methods to defusing bombs and electronic devices. Some include a sort of one player 3D pong on a round table, a giant sphere made of rods that you must prevent from extending, placing plugs into holes on a spinning wheel, and connecting electronic paths.
The code breaking game has you spinning an ever more complicated ball with symbols on it, and you have to find the correct symbol to hold in place long enough for it to be scanned, then keep spinning it to find the next one.
The sky diving game has you floating down through a series of rings, and occasionally having to fend off enemy divers trying to make you veer off course. In one instance you even have to sky dive towards a falling bomb, diffuse it, then land.
It all sounds very exciting, but there's not much more to the fun mini-games than that, and they get recycled over and over again alongside the less entertaining ones.
This includes a face matching game, where you're given a picture, and you have to find the right combination of hair, eyes, nose, chin and neck to identify the person. There's also one where you have to guide a satellite to zoom in on a person or location on a global map while avoiding detection. It may sound entertaining, but really all you're doing is controlling some arrows to move up, down, left and right. Using the EyeToy merely to control an on-screen D-Pad doesn't really take full advantage of it's capability, .
Another item that caused some frustration for me is that there's no check points in the middle of a mission. This was particularly an issue In the final mission of the game where you have to do a face match, decode a signal, find a building location, sky dive down, perform a multi-stage device defusing, then complete another sky dive with mid air combat without missing 3 rings on your way down, and no clear direction on how to fight. And the whole thing is timed from the start of the mission with time being loss for every mistake you make along the way. So if you miss 3 rings or run out of time because you didn't bank enough earlier on, you'll have to restart the mission from the beginning.
This is true for all missions. They are all timed in this manner , and none of them have check points, which can get frustrating if you happen to make a mistake at the last part of any given level. Although running out of time shouldn't be much of an issue for you until the final mission, you may find yourself having to start a mission over once or twice starting around mission 8.
Luckily the game really isn't very hard overall, but the difficulty does ramp up a little bit as progress in what felt like an unbalanced fashion. The hardest part is that if you play for too long in one sitting, you may find your arms getting tired.
The 11 missions should take no more than 3 hours to beat, which sounds short, but really it should have been even shorter considering how often the games repeat. The final mission could also easily extend your game-time by an extra hour, due to the unnecessarily frustrating last 60 seconds, which of course if you die during this time, will have you starting back at the beginning of the mission.
Aside from the main games, there are some bonus features which follow the spy theme. Things like a security camera and an alarm system. Unfortunately I don't find that these extras add a lot of value to the title.
A courageous attempt at making the EyeToy more than just an opportunity for random mini-games, however a collection of themed mini-games that must be played in a specific order then repeated, proves to not make for a better experience.