Underrated? Yes
Single Player:
Right, I found the single player a very mixed experience for me. I enjoyed it, but my main disappointment is that, on easiest difficulty, you can complete this game in 1 day. I found this frustrating as I found the single player very impressive. It was a well thought and constructed Bond adventure. I've heard a few complaints about that it's 3rd person, well I actually quite like the fact that it's a 3rd person game because now you actually feel like your playing a Bond game, and not just any old shooter. Now, going back to the point I made about difficulty, I'd recommend playing this game on hardest or 2nd hardest difficulty because it's simply more fun. The shooting felt good, the guns looked and sounded real, but on a down side, the blind fire in my opinion was a bit useless. I was playing this game on 007 difficulty and in a strange way, it was more dangerous to use blind fire then to just stand up and fire your gun, but on a plus side if you do want to use blind fire, then you pull out your gun very quickly, I've noticed some games are a bit slow with that. Now I'm just going to touch on take-downs, they were a great asset for me of this game. Unlike the previous Bond game, Quantum of Solace, you don't have to press another button as well as the take-down button to perform a take-down, and I really like this because in other games I find it frustrated how you have to press buttons quick because if your not expecting it, you'll mess up. The control's I found very well structured and easy to use. The X button is to go into cover, which is a very good part to the game, it features a very solid cover system. You can go round corners and switch to cover opposite you so I found the cover system very impressive. The square button is to perform a takedown and as I've mentioned before is impressive. You can do stealth take-downs, over cover, around corners and that's why I love the take-downs in this game. The triangle button is to switch between weapons, you can either use a hand gun or either a sub-machine gun, assault rifle, shotgun or sniper rifle. Plus, if you are lucky, possibly a grenade launcher. The circle button is like an interact button. You use it to use computers, jump, grab onto things and things like that. R1 is to fire your weapon and if you want to play safe then L1 is to aim your weapon. As well as shooting enemy's, you can use your gun to shoot shoot-able objects, which appear on your smart phone, which you press down on the keypad to activate. On your smart phone you'll be able to see enemy's and shootable objects, as well as which direction you need to go in. To activate your smart phone you press up on the keypad. You'll use this to hack computers, look for evidence, pick up intelligence items and disable security camera's. A disappointment on this single player experience is that you don't get grenade's and I've heard a few people say this is because with grenades it wouldn't feel as much as a Bond game, but being the Bond fan I am, I've seen in some of the films Bond throws grenade's so I'm puzzled why anyone would ask that. But I wished there were grenade's. The locations on the single-player I found imaginative, there's Athens, Istanbul, Monaco, Siberia, Bangkok and Burma so lots of good places to explore. Now, I'm nearly at the end of my single-player paragraph but I need to mention the vehicle sequences. They were my favourite thing you could do in the game. All of them were chase sequences were you were the chaser and you don't get to shoot, but it hardly matters because the experience of driving is phenomenal. Not only is there building's falling down in front of you but the game is constantly trying to make you crash, and that just makes the sequences better, and I think the driving sequences make this game better
Multi-player:
I found the single-player better than the multi-player but I'll go through it anyway. The controls are almost exactly the same except this time when you press square instead of performing a take-down you perform a melee attack, and this was poor because your character stands still when you attempt a melee attack and another poor thing is that in this game you can kill people at the same time so most of the time where you attempt a melee attack, you end up killing your target, but getting killed as well. Now going onto the menu you'll unfortunately realise there's only 3 game modes; Team Death-match, Objective and Last Man Standing. By playing on-line you get XP for getting kills or assists which you use to unlock new weapons or outfits. When your playing on-line you either play as MI6 or the Mercenaries. Compared to the single-player the multi-player feels rushed but still fairly enjoyable
Conclusion:
I gave the game 8 but the multi-player was disappointing. For those who like trophies the single player ones are pretty easy except 'Speed run' which took me at least 15 attempts which is a joke. The on-line ones were annoying because they simply took too long to get. I want to finish this review on a high note so I'm going to mention the theme song after you finish the Athens chapter it's really awesome! A really good thing about this game is that you believe it as a bond game and I'd love to see a Bond film out of this game