Monday 5 March 2018

007: Agent Under Fire Review - A hidden gem of Bond games?



By Sam Coles:

James Bond has been around for over 60 years, it took a while before 007 appeared in video game form with the hugely successful Goldeneye. There were other good Bond games but most of them failed to live up to the expectations of Goldeneye, however there is one game that was released in 2001 known as Agent Under Fire an early first person shooter for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Is this Bond game any good? It has its ups and downs, mostly ups.

This game has its own unique story and does not follow any of the films of the time; it’s your standard James Bond plot with an over the top evil villain with an outrageous scheme, this time involving clones. The story is fun as you would expect from a Bond plot with the voice actor playing Bond giving a great performance with innuendo and double entendre comments throughout that kept me laughing.

This is a console first person shooter from the early 2000’s, and oh boy does it feel like an early console shooter from the early 2000’s. It’s not bad by any means, but it does feel a bit stiff it has similar controls to the early Medal of Honor games such as Frontline, where you don’t run and gun, but instead run, stop and shoot. How it works is that you can shoot with an auto aim system, but it doesn’t always works properly as sometimes it will not shoot at the target you intended to kill.

You have a manual aim system like Goldeneye but it is more responsive because the PS2 analogue stick is much better than the N64, but it feels like Medal of Honor the aiming system and even the enemies react similarly that might have something to do with it being published by EA. The shooting is good for an early console shooter, but the controls can take a few minutes to get used to, but once you have a grasp it is very satisfying to gun down goons by the dozens.

There are vehicle sections that give you an open map to complete objectives in, and these are very fun when you screech around corners blasting bad guys mounted machine guns and rockets. The car controls are not realistic but have an arcade feel to them as you can accelerate into a corner and not brake.

Visually the game looks fine, not great but it’s not a bad looking game, I give the visuals some slack because the game came out in 2001. The character model of Bond doesn’t seem to be replicating any specific actor it seems like a mix of Brosnan and Dolton. The weapons look great as they are model after their real life counter parts from Bonds Walther p99 to Spaz 12’s and AK47s. The game targets 60 frames per second, but most of the time it sits at 30 when things get a bit busy when the explosions take up the screen, it’s not unplayable but it is a noticeable jump.

Is there anything wrong with Agent Under Fire? Well the big problem I have with this game is that it is really short; the game has about 12 missions which can take you 10 to 30 minutes to finish if you know what you’re doing. Another aspect I had problems with are the controls, they are very clunky and you can tell that this was the early days of console shooters, but they are fine once you get use to them.

007: Agent Under Fire is a fun first person shooter for the PlayStation 2, yes it does have a few quirks that date the game in terms of controls but it is still enjoyable once you get use to the controls and throw your mind back to 2001. This game is insanely cheap these days I found a copy in my local CEX for 50p, so grab it if you have a PS2.

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