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007 Legends Asks, 'You Want Variety? Take It! Take It ALL!'

Daniel Craig boards a time machine and ventures back to five classic Bond stories, plus Skyfall.

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Activision and Eurocom are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the James Bond franchise with 007 Legends, a new first-person shooter based on not one, not two, not even five, but six Bond films. That wide-reaching collection of source material is something of a theme for this game, as there seems to be a consistent mantra of "Oh, hell, let's just do it all!" running through the whole thing. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, mind you. This is one shooter that certainly isn't lacking for variety.

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As you would expect from a Bond shooter, you're given the tools to approach missions in a couple of ways. You can run in like a crazed gunman taking out anyone and everyone with your small armory of weapons, or you can use your fancy gadgetry to take a more measured, stealthy approach. Gadgets on offer include a watch radar that fills you in on the position of guards and a pen dart for firing various nonlethal rounds. The high-action stuff looks more or less like Call of Duty, right on down to the quick reloads and instant-kill knife swipes at close quarters, while the stealth-oriented gameplay seems a bit more interesting. Thief this is not, but the first-person perspective seems like it presents an interesting challenge for playing the game this way.

Outside of basic combat, it seems 007 Legends won't shy away from throwing crazy set pieces your way to mix up the action. In one scene we saw during today's Gamescom demo, Bond was engaged in fisticuffs with Gustav Graves, the lightning-spewing villain from Die Another Day. This scene basically played out like a game of Fight Night, a first-person brawl where the player has to dodge incoming attacks from both fists and lightning.

Another scene from the game's Die Another Day chapter involved Bond engaged in a chase scene--in a noticeably branded Aston Martin, naturally--out on the frozen ice. He's chasing a bad guy dropping bombs, while Bond is fighting back with missiles fired from his Aston. Watching this scene, all we could think of was Mario Kart, where the enemy's bombs were banana peels and the missiles were red shells. Bond did not, however, spin his car off the track and get dropped back into place by Lakitu. Unfortunately.

Then you've got the geographical variety, a byproduct of each Bond movie being a globetrotting story that's then amplified to an exponential degree thanks to 007 Legends' use of six of them. You'll be running all over the place, from Gustav Graves' BioDome-like ice palace from Die Another Day, to a drug lord's tropical cocaine refinery from A License to Kill.

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Now the one unifying element among all this variety is that this is a Daniel Craig adventure all the way through. There's no Sean Connery, no Timothy Dalton, no Pierce Brosnan. Craig's likeness (but sadly not his actual voice) has been retrofitted into those older stories, with the tone and general level of campiness shifted to be a bit more in line with Craig's modern portrayal of Bond. How will it all play out? We'll find out when 007 Legends is released this October.

Note: For those wondering, the Bond films featured in the game will be Moonraker, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill, Die Another Day, Skyfall, and a sixth that has yet to be announced.

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