007 : Blood Stone (PS3)
Rounding off my Sony family of reviews is 007 : Blood Stone on PS3. Daniel Craig comes to life in this James Bond original story, the first to do so since Everything or Nothing, and he brings Judi Dench with him. This game brings everything you love and expect from having the 007 name branded on it.
The Story
Blood Stone begins in Athens, Greece. A plot has been uncovered of a terrorist attempting a suicide assassination at a G-20 conference. M is trying to get local authorities to call off a photo-op, but they are adamant that they can cover it safely. Only being able to place her trust in one man, M calls in James Bond to go after the terrorist threat directly. Bond tracks the man to a yacht who escapes, sparking a boat chase along the water and eventually a car chase through the city where Bond ultimately stops the bomber from reaching his target.
After successfully stopping the assassination attempt, Bond is given a week’s vacation which is interrupted by M when she calls with a new potential threat.The CIA has flagged a phone conversation off of a few keywords that may lead to a dangerous chemical sale. She sends Bond off to investigate a construction site where the potential seller’s cell phone signal was last tracked to. While there, 007 shoots his way through the construction site and some ancient catacombs to eventually find the man he was sent to follow tied up to a chair, being beaten into submission for a password to a USB drive. Bond follows the man who had been delivering the torture, named Bernin, who succesfully hands off the USB drive before Bond can stop him. But not before giving up the name of the man buying the information on the drive, Stefan Pomerov.
A worldwide chase ensues, leading Bond to Pomerov’s personally owned casino in Monaco, a chemical factory in Siberia, Bangkok, Berma, and back to Monaco again, trying to foil the plot of a lone man creating weapons of mass destruction. And all done in a true James Bond fashion.
The Controls
For Blood Stone, you’re given a very generic control scheme for a 3rd person shooter, which can be broken down into three areas of the controller essentially.
The first, main area is the movement and shooting. As per usual, the joysticks control your movement (left joystick) and looking around (right). R1 shoots your gun and L1 lets you aim more precise. R2 is your button to reload your gun manually, and holding it allows you to pick up new weapons as you need them.
The second area is where you get your controls for cover, melee combat, and switching weapons, which these are all found on the button side of the controller. X is how you enter and exit cover, and also how flip between covers (by tapping X while holding the left joystick in the direction you want to move) or to maintain cover around the corner of a wall (hold the X button while pushing the left joystick towards the corner of the wall). O lets you vault over cover, jump gaps, open/kick doors, and initiate climbing ladders. Square is your melee button when enemies are close enough. Lastly, Triangle switches between your two weapons, a sidearm and a two handed gun.
The last area is your gadget (sadly only one in this game) and special ability. Bond goes out, after the cold opening mission, equipped with a smartphone that allows him to detect and track enemies, as well as scan evidence in the missions. You activate and deactivate the phone by pressing down on the D-pad, and holding up allows you to scan the evidence when you are in range of it. The phone also shows you where your objectives are.
Bond’s special ability is a focus aim. You are allowed to “store” three of these, which you gain by performing melee takedowns. They are used by holding L2 instead of L1 when aiming your gun. The focus aim “slows” time and instantly locks on for a headshot on any enemy. If you have more than one stored, after the first shot it will move to the next closest target from where you are aimed, letting you chain together a few quick kills. Very reminiscent of the mark-and-execute system from the later Splinter Cell games.
There’s nothing that necessarily stands out for this control scheme, as it is a 3rd person shooter, it doesn’t leave much room for getting fancy.
The Gameplay
Blood Stone brings an all original story to the consoles for a Bond game, but with it, it brings everything you’d expect to get while watching a Bond movie; fast expensive cars, a beautiful Bond girl, and plenty of over the top action.
The first mission serves it’s purpose of introducing you to the base mechanics of the game. You learn your movement, how to use your weapons, takedown enemies from cover, and it tops off with two separate chases to show you driving on land and on water. And after all the lessons are over, you get to sit back to watch the Bond-style title sequence and listen to the theme for the game.
Each mission brings you to a new exotic location to do some spywork. You enter each place with a general objective of finding a certain person or piece of information, and along the way adjusting for obstacles that pop up.
Generally the opening sections of the missions are heavy with detective work, investigating different computers or locations to try and determine what has been going on. Then, Bond comes across his first area being patrolled by enemy forces and they don’t stop until the end of the level. This is where the smartphone comes in handy, as you can use it to see who is hiding behind cover, and if any new friends are coming to the playground.
The shooting mechanics are very well done, but, again, with it being a shooter, there isn’t a whole lot of room for getting fancy. When not using your gun, the reticle is reduced to a small, almost clear dot so it doesn’t get in the way of anything. When you go to aim to shoot, a cross of four lines appears around the center of the screen, and a small circle pops up when your bullet hits home.
A good portion of the enemies go down with a quick burst of gunfire, or a solitary headshot. It isn’t until the last couple of levels when the only different enemy appears, a shotgun wielding heavy armored brute. These take more body shots to bring down, but if you can place a headshot through the open faceplate of the helmet, they drop right away. Also in the latter half of the game, enemies begin wearing basic helmets that the same applies, if you can place the bullet in the open area of the helmet they go right down. Otherwise a quick double tap shot works just as well, the first sending the helmet flying and the second delivering the kill.
The only “bosses” you face come in the form of vehicles and not people. The first is a tank, that stalks you through half of the level. Your only tactic at first is to switch from cover to cover, minimizing yourself from being shot at until you eventually get to take it down with a grenade launcher. The second half of the same mission, the person that all your work has brought you to begins stalking you from the gunner seat of a fighter jet, which you eventually take down with the environment around you (avoiding spoilers).
In the driving portions of the game, the pace is intense the whole time you’re behind the wheel of the car/boat. My favorite one of these is one of the early ones where Bond is racing through the streets trying to keep up with a train. The road becomes blocked causing Bond to drive off it and follow the train by driving on the ice of a frozen river. The game does a great job of adjusting the conditions for the terrain you’re driving on, as well as the handling for the different cars you get to drive. Each chase usually involves you starting on the road and then partway through, going off road forcing you to adjust to new conditions.
Overall, 007 : Blood Stone is a very fun play, even moreso if you’re a Bond fan. It’s a fast play at around 6-7 hours of gameplay, but as I’ve stated a few times, it brings all of the punches of a Bond movie sucking you in from start to finish. So let’s break it down….
The Challenge (or lack thereof?)
As evidenced by the short playtime, Blood Stone isn't much of a challenge. There are a few sections that come up where you might get a little stuck and have to redo it a couple of times, but it's more from it not being totally clear where you should be going. But you never get overwhelmed with enemies, or have them sneaking up on you as you can easily monitor them with the smartphone. When it all comes down, however, the challenges and annoyances are mostly tied in with the smartphone.
While sending bullets flying at your enemies, you never have to worry about being surprised or overtaken by them. With the smartphone, it instantly brings up every enemy in the immediate area. It's nice, but if you're looking for a challenge this completely takes away from it. You can literally walk through every area, take cover at the beginning of it and scan with your phone to see if anyone is there. Some areas do work with spawn points, where you have to reach a general spot in the zone before enemies start swarming you, but even this loses it's hype since in a moment you can see how many guys are coming at you and where they're coming from.
The driving sections are well balanced. They're not too difficult, nor are they too easy. Who or whatever you are chasing is constantly marked and all you're doing is following them, slaloming between other cars and obstacles. A couple of these run into visibility issues where you don't really get enough time to avoid the next obstacle coming your way, and these turn into a bit of a memory game, dropping back to the last checkpoint and setting markers for yourself so you know when and where to turn. Other than this, the driving levels are broken up quite well, you get an even split of stretches where it's just you and your objective on the road, and stretches where you're avoiding everything coming your way.
The two bosses you face aren't so bad either. They all involve a lot of dodging fire from the tank/jet and you're given more than enough cover to do so. The only trick of it is timing your movements in the gaps of fire headed your way. It steps up a little when you have to balance between staying in cover to avoid the tank/jet fire, but you have enemies on the ground you have to contend with as well. The snap-to aim helps greatly with this.
Oddly enough, the greatest challenge/annoyance in this game comes from just simply getting to your objectives. Your normal heads-up display only shows the gun you're using, the amount of ammo in it, how many Focus Aim's you have, and when it's available, the prompt for going into cover or climbing a ladder. The ONLY way to get any sort of objective marker up is by bringing up the smartphone, which wouldn't be so bad except when you move while having the smartphone turned on, the screen gets all distorted until you can't see anything at all. So it becomes a completely unnecessary challenge to the game.
All said and done, there isn't much of a challenge to Blood Stone, but there are definitely some annoying imperfections that end up making themselves a challenge. But, let's look at the good and the bad sides of this game.
PROS
- A completely original theme written just for the game, paired up with an authentically styled Bond title credit sequence, gets this thing rolling right out of the gate making any bond fan happy.
- Daniel Craig and Judi Dench enter in their roles from the newest Bond movies respectively as Bond and M. Having such familiar faces to go with the original story help with pulling you deeper into the game as you go along for the ride.
- A little Easter Egg that I won't be spoiling, but a VERY big name from the realm of Bond villains makes a brief appearance in the epilogue of the game. (Nope I'm not telling you, just play it for yourself and find out, I promise it's worth it).
- They bring some of the classic Bond originality to a lot of the scenes in the game; keeping up with a train by driving on an icy river, problems solved by shooting the nearest piece of explosive equipment, all the things you'd expect to see in any of the Bond films.
- Optional difficulty level, always a plus in any game, let's you choose just how much you want to coast through the game and enjoy the story, or truly live like Bond.
CONS
- The game seems to present itself with a stealth play-style, but you're not really able to do much with it as far as avoiding detection. If you are in cover, and have an enemy nearby you can pull them into cover and kill them, while at the same time keeping the body from view of the others to avoid raising alarms. However, this is the only way you can hide the bodies, you can't drag them from the open to a hiding spot, even though numerous times in the opening levels you are given a little pop-up tip about keeping the bodies hidden to avoid detection. Seems hypocritical of itself.
- Not having a HUD or objective marker is a big miss, especially in this type of game where you're constantly moving towards an objective. While the game is linear and doesn't offer much for exploration, there are plenty of times where you reach junctions and a number of ways to choose from. Sometimes you only need to go one way, others you have to go all of them to obtain multiple pieces of a code or something along those lines. And to make it a little worse, the only way you can keep the markers on the screen at all times is by keeping the smartphone opened, but you'll be running around with a distorted screen constantly. So you get to choose not knowing where you're going but seeing everything, or knowing where you're going but going in blind.
