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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