James Bond 007: Blood Stone Hands-On

With no new James Bond film in sight, it seems that some unexpected attention has been brought on James Bond 007: Blood Stone, the latest game to put you in the role of the world’s most famous fictional spy. But Activision and the development team at Bizarre Creations are seemingly up to the challenge, as Blood Stone features not only a script written by well-known Bond scribe Bruce Feirstein, but also voice-overs provided by Judy Dench, Daniel Craig, and Joss Stone, who is not only playing the Bond girl in the game, but also providing the title song. If that’s not enough, all of Bond’s motion-captured movements featured in the game were provided by Daniel Craig’s stunt double, who probably knows more than anyone about how James Bond should behave in a fight.

While all of this is sure to please fans of the Bond films, Bizarre Creations is going to great lengths to ensure that the game itself is just as entertaining as any good Bond film. Therefore, Blood Stone will feature a mixture of action, with some levels focusing exclusively on Bond and his unique ability to maneuver his way out of just about any situation--in this case, an ambush inside a construction site where a bioweapons scientist is believed to be held. Naturally, Bond has to fight his way out of the ambush using a combination of physical skills, gunplay (though it’s not always necessary), and limited use of a single gadget--a smart phone that delivers basic augmented reality information, such as waypoints and enemy positions. There are also specific points in a level that you can scan with Bond’s phone to gain some extra details about the mission. But you can’t just walk through the entire level with it turned on like some might have done with Batman’s detective vision in Batman: Arkham Asylum, which functioned in a somewhat similar fashion. The signal will eventually get disrupted, preventing you from clearly seeing the information.

When it’s time for Bond to take on some bad guys, you probably don’t want to have anything blocking your view anyway. As previously mentioned, Bond has a few options when encountering enemies--he can be stealthy and sneak up on enemies to take them down, or he can simply use his firearm. However, when you take an enemy out with a melee attack, you’re given a focus aim, which grants you a one-shot kill on any enemy you decide to use it on. Think of it as something similar to the mark-and-execute feature in Splinter Cell: Conviction where Sam earned tokens that in turn enabled him to mark enemies and kill them with a single bullet. Plus, it’s just cool to see the many different ways Bond manages to knock an enemy out, whether it’s by slamming heads into concrete pillars or choking an unsuspecting goon with his leg. Still, if you decide to fire your weapon, Blood Stone also has a cover system in place, allowing 007 to seek refuge from the hail of bullets that inevitably come flying his way.

What was also interesting about this particular part of the demo is how differently you can play the game. The first time through, we saw a slower, more-methodical Bond, taking out enemies with deadly precision and little firepower. But the second time through, Bond tore through the environment at great speed, melee attacking enemies and firing his weapon with equally deadly efficiency. Either choice seems to depend largely on your skill and patience and just how comfortable you feel with the game’s mechanics.

Bond eventually makes his way toward the catacombs buried next to the construction sight, and it’s not long before he finds himself in a heap of trouble. The massive drill used to dig the holes beneath the surface suddenly turns on while Bond maneuvers up some scaffolding, and it doesn’t take long to realize that you have to move a little faster to avoid certain death. But this is James Bond we’re talking about, and in the demo, he safely escapes the drill with some athletic moves, and we’re greeted with a cutscene that shows the kidnapped scientist being abused by a shifty-looking courier responsible for delivering very important information to those of the criminal persuasion.

In the next scene, we get to see how the game seamlessly transfers into racing game mode when Bond takes after the courier through the streets of Istanbul in his own car. If there’s one word that can describe this sequence adequately, it would probably be "intense." There’s just so much action going on around you, some of it designed to obscure your view or possibly even distract you from your ultimate goal of chasing down the courier. We might even go so far as to say that this is probably what would happen if Michael Bay directed a driving sequence in a Bond film.

We had a chance to go hands-on at this point, but not with this particular driving mission. Rather, we got to try a small portion of a driving sequence in Siberia where Bond chases after a train in his Aston Martin with Joss Stone’s character in tow. This driving mission is somewhat similar in the sense that you really need to pay attention to the layout of the track and where the road leads--one false turn and you’ll end up in a nearby river. Interestingly, we found the controls to be a little loose, making it difficult to gauge just how much power to put behind turns or how to use brakes effectively, but for now, we’re chalking that up to having jumped right in to a mission that occurs so late in the game (and is designed to be difficult under normal circumstances anyway).

We’ll be sure to have more on James Bond 007: Blood Stone, including more information about its team-based and deathmatch multiplayer options, before its release on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the PC later this year. A DS version is also in the works.