In celebration of the upcoming James Bond film, No Time To Die, being released October 8th 2021 let’s take a look at the different entries during the golden age of Bond video games on the PlayStation 2

Title: James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire

Genre: First Person Shooter

Released: November 13th 2001

Platforms: Xbox / Ps2 / GameCube

Developed: EA

~ Agent Under Fire was released sandwiched between Pierce Brosnan’s last two films, the awesome, The World is Not Enough (99) and the atrocious, Die Another Day (02) ~

Who Played Bond?

– Originally talks with Roger Moore were ongoing to have him reprise his role as Bond but the negotiations fell through.

– Bicknell has been a career long character actor appearing in scores of shows and movies over his decades long career.

Bond Girl(s)?

Zoe Nightshade is a CIA operative whose cover is blown while she is a mole in Hong Kong based company, Identicon.

Villain

Bloch is the CEO for Identicon Corporation. A corporation that has its roots in botany research but has moved on to much more malicious research and development. Like trying to clone all of the world’s leaders.

It’s an okay villain plan, I guess. But there is one pretty major flaw that is somehow ignored as it seemingly takes Mi6 years to realize that THE COMPANY NAMED IDENTICON IS TRYING TO ILLEGALLY CLONE PEOPLE.

If I were I don’t know – some sort of Hank Scorpio supervillain- intent on say killing scores of people I probably wouldn’t name my fictional bullshit company after my plans. That’d be like being the CEO for MASSKILLER INC.

Do these Bond villains waste all of their creativity on the plan alone?

Anyways. Moving on.

This game is fantastic. I have always wondered since it came out why it got average and mediocre reviews. I think it averages about a 74% on Metacritic these days and for as smooth as the gameplay is I think it was solely a victim of overhype. Being the first Bond game on the next generation of consoles. Had Nightfire came out first I could see AUF rating much higher at the time.

One thing I will note is when you do go to play this bad boy, make sure to change your controller setup to “configuration 3”. Those of this born in the 80’s that grew up with console first person shooters will remember the configuration before the “modern controls”. It’s funny trying to play the default configuration now – it’s impossibly inconvenient and unnatural. How far console gaming has come!

Altogether a really fun game – the shooting and movement feels good, the driving missions are particularly smooth and fun which is rare and the graphics aren’t great but it’s not particularly ugly. My only gripe with the game is that it’s short. You can blow through the campaign pretty quickly – and while it does have a grading system offers some replayability it’s not enough to convince me.

Overall: 83% BRONZE

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