Agent Under Fire Preview
We take a close look at EA's upcoming Bond game.
Thanks in part to the efforts of Rare Ltd., games based on the 007 property have become relatively hot. EA now holds the license, and, as the deluge of recent games based on it have made evident, the publisher is not squandering it. The latest game to bare James Bond's likeness has been in development, in some form, for quite a while. Now titled James Bond In...Agent Under Fire, the game was originally the PS2 version of the Quake III engine-powered The World Is Not Enough. For reasons unknown, however, the publisher decided that the game would follow another path altogether. What resulted is a Bond game that seems to want to capture, interactively, all the elements that have made the famous series so memorable.
Agent Under Fire bears no ties to any existing Bond narrative. Rather, the development team worked with seasoned scriptwriters, along with license holders MGM and Danjaq, to craft an original Bond story. The result is a story populated mostly by new characters and a couple of Bond mainstays, such as M, R, and, of course, Q. All throughout, you'll venture, as James Bond, to a variety of fitting locales: Monaco, China, and Hungary, among others. Aside from the level of freedom granted by this kind of deviation, EA mentioned that part of its motive was to present a story whose twists would truly surprise you--since you have no reference from which to draw, you won't necessarily know what the significance of certain occurrences and the allegiances of certain characters are.
Seventy-five percent of the game will focus on the type of FPS action you've come to associate with the 007 license. At this point, the game is composed of 12 missions, eight of which will be action/stealth-oriented first-person stages. As you'd imagine, all types of things will go on during these stages--heavily scripted events, full-on gun battles, and a good deal of sneaking. Some of the stages we got to play during our preview of the game included things such as a scripted-gun battle, in which a helicopter flew over and provided a good deal of suppressive fire (on one man); a sneaky foray into a British government building, during which we were armed with a tranquilizer gun and had to quietly take out guards; and a straight-up infiltration of an industrial complex in China, at the end of which we had to rescue a buxom CIA operative that was handcuffed to the deck of a submarine.
The weapons and gadgets at your disposal will facilitate all of this. All the heavy gear you've come to associate with a Bond game is present: everything from handguns, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles to submachine guns, shotguns, and rocket launchers. The gadgets are just as varied. You'll use a special wristwatch device fashioned by Q himself to do a number of things: infiltrate locked areas by means of an intrusive laser, access remote areas with a grappling claw, and invade enemy computer systems with its security functions. You'll also have access to things such as X-ray glasses (used to spot hidden panels in walls, among other things) and jetpacks (whose functions are gleefully self-explanatory).
The environments in which these missions are set seem to be very well constructed. Graphical strength of the technology aside, the areas seem to be intricately designed and full of interactive elements. Most everything in the game seems to be destructible in some respect; crates will shed particles when shot at, and the wall textures will char when blasted. Other elements actually affect the gameplay. For instance, one of the stages we played had us running through a kitchen in one sequence. Getting too close to the pots and pans hanging about resulted in a good deal of noise, which subsequently alerted nearby guards. And when they did come, the firefight that ensued sent flatware a flying.
Guns, though, are only half the story. Read on to learn about the game's less-stationary elements.
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- GameSpot Score6.8fair
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James Bond in Agent Under Fire Movie 16
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- Sep 18, 2001
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