Tomorrow Never Dies (PS1)
And so it is here, the final review for 2016. It's been an awesome time running this blog so thank you so much for everyone who checks it out. The first game I reviewed was Spyro on PS1, so I figure why not end the year on the same console? James Bond is a pretty iconic fictional figure, and his movies have spawned a decent amount of games, some based on the movies and some completely original. Earlier in the year I reviewed one of the original ones, Blood Stone on PS3. So this time, let's play one of the ones based on one of the movies. One of my personal favorite Brosnan films : Tomorrow Never Dies.
The Story
So if you've seen the movie, you already know the premise of the game. Bond is on a mission in Russia to start things off, infiltrating and destroying an arms base. After destroying it out and escaping in one of the jets, Bond returns to MI6 where he is briefed on a British Warship that was downed in the ocean, and more specifically the Carter Media Group who wrote about it in the news before MI6 was even aware of the ship going down. M sends Bond in to investigate the CMG and see what their aim really is in the scheme of things, and to eliminate them if need be.
The Controls
Released just two years after Goldeneye, the developers decided to not copy the first person perspective on this one, and you instead control Bond from behind his back. The D-Pad (or left joystick if you turn on the controller's analog mode) control his movement. X fires your weapon, O will make you look in the direction of the closest enemy if they are close enough to sense, holding △ let's you cycle between your weapon wheel and gadget wheel, and □ uses your active gadget. L1 crouches and let's you walk slowly, R1 brings up an aiming reticle for manual aiming, and L2 and R2 strafe left and right respectively.
It's a good control layout, the only difficulty is adjusting after more modern shooters where you have the dual joysticks to move and aim, instead of having one joystick (or the D-Pad) for both. But how is the game itself?
The Gameplay
As I mentioned above, Tomorrow Never Dies follows the plot of the movie, although a little bit roughly. Some areas are altered so it makes more sense within the realm of a video game, but the majority of the plot presence is there. The game is broken up into ten individual levels, all with about the same premise : you have a short list of objectives to complete, and then you must escape.
Your objectives have a wide range, from photographing specific pieces of equipment or weaponry, rendezvousing with an ally, destroying something, or obtaining some sort of key or object. The overall plot is uncovered as the game goes on, as you start off not knowing anything about Carter Media Group other than the fact that they posted an article about a warship going down before a military agency even learned about it. So as you uncover details about them and what happened, your plot opens up more and more.
The levels themselves are extremely linear, giving you absolutely no chances for exploration. You're essentially moving in one direction through a guided hallways from where you start the mission to where you must escape. For the most part, your objectives happen progressively and you come across each one of them in turn, but there are some where you have a bit of "free roam" to complete them. For example the second level, your first three objectives are to obtain three different photographs, and you can take the pictures in whichever order you find pleases you. But that's about as "open" as this game gets.
Through the course of the game, your enemies are all the same sort of generic gun-toting bad guy hell bent on stopping you from completing your mission. The only variation in enemy type is the type of weaponry that some carry. Even the bosses you come across tote the same guns as their goons do.
In the levels, you have access to weapons and gadgets. The gadgets are all on your person once you start the level, and the only reason you need to track them down ever, is if the mission leads to you being captured at some point and your equipment taken away from you. The gadgets can be anything from a camera, a laser meant to designate targets for a fly-over missile drop, sticky mines, and many more. As for the weapons, you start every level with Bond's PK7 pistol, but you are able to pick up assault rifles, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers as your enemies drop them.
Your health depletes as you take damage, and only recovers if you heal yourself with a medkit, which you start each level with a couple of these, and more can be found in each level. You can also buff yourself a bit by finding jackets of armor that won't regain you any health, but they'll add a "layer" of health for you, so any damage you take comes off the armor portion first before returning to your own health. The last thing you start each level with are three lives, and some levels have a golden "007" token you can pick up for an extra life. Whenever you die, you lose a life and restart in the exact place you die, and repeats until you lose them all and earn yourself a mission failed.
At the end of each mission, your final objective is to escape. Some of these only require you to reach a certain point and it auto-escapes for you, but there are some levels where your escape is active, like the opening level when Bond escapes down the mountainside on skis and you actually control him all the way down.
All in all, Tomorrow Never Dies is a pretty fun game, and a decent adaptation of the movie it's based off of. But before we get too much into that, let's look at how difficult this one is.
The Challenge (or lack thereof?)
So you want to play as James Bond? This game is going to throw a couple areas of difficulty at you to see if you're really up for wearing the shoes of the great spy, namely the enemies, the bosses, and the objectives in each level.
The normal enemies are mostly easy to deal with, but with a splash of moderate difficulty in there as well. Most don't wear much for armor, so as long as you use the auto-aim lock, you can take them out pretty quickly. The splash of moderate comes from the enemies swarming you in numbers, and this is due to two things. 1. The game can only generate so much in a specific field of vision, so if they're really far away you can't even tell they exist until the bullets start hitting you. And 2. They make sure they stand far enough away from each other (I'm not sure if this is programmed AI, or if they have really wide invisible barriers between each other) but this makes it difficult to keep them all on screen so you know where to move to dodge their shots.
Bosses are a moderate difficulty. They're essentially treated as beefed-up enemies that can take a lot more damage and are better at attacking you. However, these guys come with a Hit Point counter hanging over their heads, so you can see just how well you're doing against them. You'll spend an equal amount of time in these fights dodging fire as much as you deal it out. While they're not endurance-length fights, these ones will take a bit longer to get through.
Lastly, the objectives are easy, and ridiculously so. Like I mentioned in the Gameplay section, you uncover these naturally, and even if you didn't, the minimal structure in the levels doesn't leave many places for you to check to get your mission completed. With the way it plays out though, you reach everything as you work your way through the game, so all of the objectives are laid out and waiting for you to get to them.
In the end, not a very challenging game. But, before we slap a verdict on this one, let's look at what's good and bad about it.
PROS
- Bullets Actually Travel. This one actually surprised me when I was playing this game. A lot of older shooters didn't code in anything about the bullets moving from point A to point B when you shot. You would just line up, pull the trigger, and instantly hit whatever you were aimed at. However, in Tomorrow Never Dies, you actually have to compensate for the bullets moving because if you're trying to hit a moving person, you won't unless you lead your shot. It's an uncommon quality in earlier shooting games, but this one is very well done and you'll definitely feel a sense of accomplishment when you can pull off leading your target successfully.
- Movie Clips. I've played older movie-based games many times before, and for what I've seen they either only use clips from the movies for the game cutscenes, or generate everything themselves. This one does both. Usually the movie clips are only used at the end of the missions, but the beginning of the levels and anything done mid-level are all done with the games graphics. As clunky as it looks in the old graphics, I prefer this personally because it doesn't interrupt the flow of the game by watching a piece of the movie, then playing a small portion, and watching more movie, and back and forth for all the levels. Doing it this way makes seeing the movie clip seem like your reward for completing the levels.
- Wai Lin. She's the other agent that Bond allies with in the mission during the movie, and not only is she present in this game, you get to control her for a section as well. Not a HUGE detail, but it's one worth noting especially since she plays a key role in how the mission turns out during the movie too, so respecting that enough to include being able to play as her in the game is a nice touch.
CONS
- Enemies Too Easy. I can't stress enough how incredibly easy the guys are to take down. Just two shots from your silenced pistol is all it takes. The only time they become difficult is when they come at you in numbers. I almost felt like I could hand the controller to my three-month old and have him take everyone out for me with no problem. The game does use varying difficulty levels which you can use, but on the "normal" setting (labeled as Agent) there's no challenge at all for your main source of bad guys.
- Some Key Moments Altered/Left Out. This is something that happens a lot. Portions of movies have to be changed so the scenario can better apply to being in a video game. It's not a huge deal, it makes sense more than anything. But in this one, some of my favorite points of the movie are either left out completely (from you playing at least) or changed drastically. For instance, when Bond escapes from the Russian mission in the fighter jet, it all takes place in a cutscene. In the movie he's being choked from someone who hid behind the pilot's seat, as well as chased down by a second jet. It would've been a great mini-level to fly the plane having to at least avoid the fire coming at you from behind.
Final Verdict
As both a die hard James Bond fan, as well as a gamer, this game was plenty of fun to play, and surprisingly given that it's based off a movie. For me personally, movies-turned-video-game are a taboo area, as they are mostly so horribly done that the games seem better off broken into pieces than played to completion. Tomorrow Never Dies is different, and while it does have some imperfections, they don't really take away from the enjoyability of the game. So if you're a Bond fan, you'll definitely like having this one for how true to the movie it is. As a not-Bond fan, this would just be a generic 3rd-person shooter in your collection. And while it doesn't stand out as an amazing game in that genre, it's not a horrible one either, so it really comes down to your own opinion. This one is exclusive to PS1, and all variations can be found for under $15 (sealed and new), CIB for $5, and just the disc for only $2.
Thanks again guys for a great 2016 and I can't wait to be back in 2017 with more content on YouTube and here on this blog. I'll return the week starting January 8th, but I'll be streaming until then on YouTube, so stay tuned on the Facebook Page for updates on when I go online to play.
