Video game-movie tie-ins have become a mixed bag overtime. They used to be largely horrible, now they’re largely mediocre. GoldenEye was probably the first video game based on a movie that was so good as a game that it could’ve stood alone without the movie tie-in. The World Is Not Enough was not a good follow-up to that legacy, but it also wasn’t even done by the same people.
The Story
Pretty much the movie. It follows the film much more closely than GoldenEye, with every level having appeared in the movie in some capacity. Obviously there are some embellishments to make it into something interesting to play, and it deviates from the film to allow that.
The Game
It’s a first-person shooter. Unlike in the movie, Bond has no vehicles in this game and there’s only two levels where you get to destroy any… well, technically three if you count the submarine.
For the most part if you’re just taking your time on the easiest difficulty it does alright. There’s points of difficulty, some stages may be frustrating, but it’s not the worst or anything. Maybe a little harder than GoldenEye. It does ok if you’re playing along and taking your time on the medium difficulty, mostly. Hard was too hard for me, and much like the last two levels of GoldenEye (and bonus stages there) I have no idea how’d you beat it on hard unless the game’s random number generator which decides whether or not you get hit was very favorable that day.
Multiplayer is fantastic. Multiplayer is above and beyond single player. Multiplayer here is at GoldenEye levels. Different maps, weapons, scenarios, and characters for multiplayer are unlocked by completing certain single player levels on certain difficulties within certain time limits. In other words you have to speedrun in order to unlock extras for multiplayer. These extras make a good experience even better and give more replay value, making it such that you could almost just sit around setting up skirmishes in multiplayer between yourself and computer-controlled characters instead of doing the single-player games and have just as much fun, if not more.
Now we get to the problem. This game was NOT designed for speedrunning. None of the problems below seemed too much of a bother when taking your time through a stage, but when speedrunning to enhance the main reason to buy this game they become agonizingly apparent.
- The “Night Watch” stage demonstrates pretty well one of the games worst features. To beat it, you have a limited time to photograph two documents and plant a phone tap. Like a way too limited time, especially given this feature- when you take a photo or place a tap, some words appear in your field of view saying you did so. While they are displayed, you CAN’T take any more photos or plant any taps. So you have to wait for the exact moment it disappears otherwise you’ll have waited too long. Also, you need to aim your crosshairs dead-center on the object you are photographing or tapping, because if you don’t then you get a message saying “cannot use item here” and you have to wait several seconds for that to go away. You don’t even have time to wait more than a second after the text disappears when you successfully plant a tap or take a picture, so of course you have no time to aim properly. Oh, and this is the last part of the stage so when you screw up you have to start all over just to get back here. It’s not annoying here, but later in the game its tendency to display words telling you about stuff can interfere with your ability to see enemies who are shooting at you.
- Don’t let those YouTube videos fool you- in particular on the “Night Watch” stage. I did, move for move, exactly what the videos showed and it never worked. Each stage plays differently each time you play it, there’s like several variations programmed into it as to where enemies are placed or how likely certain things are to happen. This of course makes speedrunning to get the multiplayer unlockables dependent on luck as well as skill.
- Then there’s the security cameras- I guess their collision box isn’t mapped all the way through because I emptied over 20 rounds into one from point blank. No it’s not built that tough, it actually takes only one shot to destroy it, you just need to find where your bullet doesn’t pass through it.
- And when you do destroy the cameras- maybe guards will be alerted, maybe not, no way of telling because both happened to me with no other variables accounting for why. Again, this is crucial for speedrunning because the alternative way to disable the cameras adds a lot of time to your effort.
- The level design can be kind of confusing.
- Jumping is broken. In some spots it’s rare that the first or even second time you jump you’ll leap over the object you want to cross. This is vexing especially when there are sections you NEED to jump, and you’ll fall to your death if it misfires, but you won’t know it misfired until you’re on your way to the ground.
- Hostages- you have to rescue them at points, and they tend to, out of gratitude I guess, try to be your human shield.
- Then there’s other stages with civilians running around where they’ll sometimes be shot for sport because the enemies will fire at them once you are well outside their active range of shooting you.
- In fact, sometimes there’s no gun shot at all and you hear a hostage getting hit and suddenly have to restart the mission.
- Reloading your gun takes FOREVER, and you can’t switch weapons while reloading. Like I alluded to earlier, it’s not so bad if you’re taking your time and can shoot at enemies from behind something, but to speedrun you need to put yourself right into the middle of so many enemies it causes the framerate to slow down.
- Some enemies don’t drop their guns immediately, and even cling to them when they go over the side of a platform, so when speedrunning you don’t get that needed ammo.
- Autoaim is more helpful than not, but plenty of times it gets jammed up on someone at a bad angle or on someone you can’t shoot at while, ignoring someone you can shoot at next to them.
- The button for reloading is the same as the button for opening doors, so sometimes when you want to open a door you reload instead.
- Then there’s the liiiiiiittle problem that some gadgets just plain won’t work no matter how many times you press the button to activate them. This is especially noticeable when you are being shot at with bullets and rockets so you have seconds to use an object on something, but it just refuses to be used so you get torn to pieces when otherwise you’d only lose some of your health.
- There’s a little gap between when you finish reloading and can actually shoot again. It looks like you can shoot, but you can’t, and the gap extends if you are trying to shoot in this interval.
- Collision detection is a little sketchy- you can get stuck on doors, briefly stuck in a wall on a staircase and end up flying to the bottom, and once in a while an enemy spawns inside a wall.
- Oh and the problem with the gadgets extends to the doors too, which kinda sucks if you are being shot at and can’t get to safety because the button assigned for opening doors decides not to work.
- The delay between when you use a gadget and it fails and when you can use it again gets particularly annoying when the reason it failed is you got shot and that knocked you off target so you used the gadget on the air and now have to stand for several seconds getting shredded while waiting for the game to let you use the gadget again
- You can’t even pull out a gadget while reloading. While reloading if instead of the change weapon or change gadget button you go to the start menu and change that way, you still won’t change anything until the reload animation is done. This does not bode well when you are under fire.
- If you are too close and the enemy is crouched, autoaim won’t work.
- Sometimes the bad guys and good guys look very similar… and you can’t kill even one good guy.
- Going up and down ladders is… a problem. In other games pushing “back” will knock you off a ladder. In this one it’s how you get down, and you start looking down when you hold it. But if you want to shoot something right under you, the moment you aim you start facing forward, and then you have to press forward in order to aim down. So you go from looking down because you hold back to looking down because you hold forward and then looking down because you hold back again when you stop aiming.
- One of the levels requires an extensive amount of swimming and the controls are… awful. Just awful. You have to stop and use the aiming feature to change which direction you are looking in, which is something you have to do frequently. Trouble is that you are losing air this entire time, and you turn very slowly.
- This is a mixed bag for some but after an entire game where up is up and down is down, when you change direction while swimming so that you are looking along the vertical axis instead of the horizontal axis, your controls change too because they move you relative to the direction you are looking, not relative to what is up or down.
- There is one point where you need to jump at a bar hanging above your head in order to initiate a cutscene. You can easily hit it and bounce off. One time there were enemies in front of the bar when I did this, and the cutscene played and showed my character being moved, but then when it ended my character had not actually moved at all because the enemies were in the way. This led to instant death.
- Similar to the bar you can miss, at some points you need to climb a long thin rope and can easily pass right through it.
Is It The Same As The PlayStation Version?
What an interesting question, thank you for asking! No it is not. There is reason for confusion though. All but one of the mission names on the PlayStation version are the same as on the N64 version. A bit of dialog is the same between versions. It sounds like the same voice actors were used. It looks like you have the same weapons.
There are very noticeable differences, starting with the menus which look better on the PlayStation version- everything but the pause menu, which the N64 wins even though the PlayStation calls up the pause menu in a better way. The levels in the PlayStation version look more detailed (This I think is partly due to a programming oversight in the N64 version’s code that doesn’t give the graphics their full resolution, combined with the N64’s strange output that seems to somehow lower the console’s video output quality. If you play the PlayStation and N64 on the same TV, even playing the same game with the same graphics, the difference between the two is like the difference between a CRT TV and a HD TV, with PlayStation being HD.); the N64 version does some of the 3D stuff better (not all, but a lot), but the texture details and amount of detail put into each environment looks better on the PlayStation version. The PlayStation version has better music quality and a more diverse array. I have never played it though so I can’t say if the issues I mentioned earlier with the N64 version apply or if the PlayStation version is bad in different ways.
My Opinion
What I can say is that it’s worth it for the multiplayer experience, and even worth suffering through the single player speedruns to get at least some of the multiplayer unlockables. The PlayStation version does not have multiplayer.
C-Gaymer 