Review: James Bond: Blood Stone

Do you like James Bond? Do you like high action? Yes? Blood Stone is great for about four hours of exhilarating Bond action. It actually feels like you are James Bond, something that I feel only Nightfire and Goldeneye have pulled off in the past.

Blood Stone is quite the experience, the car chases, the over the top action moments. It’s just pure fun.

However, with all of these awesome action parts, you are stuck with quite a few firefight moments that honestly take way too much time. Enemies take too long to go down, long repetitive corridors and annoying enemy dialog spoil a lot of the fun. It’s kind of nitpicky to claim that the dialog is rather annoying, but it ranks up near the award winning “I WILL DESTROY YOU” line from Mass Effect.

The biggest downfalls are that the game is incredibly short, offers no replay value and it feels like you are playing a shell of a game, as the developers who made Blood Stone no longer exist. And it’s rather sad, because Blood Stone doesn’t do Bizarre Creations justice. That and the fact that there will never be any patches, more maps, or bug fixes leaves the game rather dead. Don’t even bother with the multiplayer, I couldn’t get it to work.

And that’s the problem with Blood Stone, as amazing the action sequences are, there are a lot of design choices (or forced choices) that were made for the worst. Like for example, making all of James Bond’s cars handle like shit. It really spoiled the specular chase scenes, and to make it worse, a lot of the driving sequences require you to make split second decisions, something that Bond’s cars cannot handle at all, thus causing you to go for a dip in the pond. Again.

In the end, James Bond: Blood Stone has a lot of awesome action parts, but combined with confusing level design and fight sequences that honestly aren’t worth it, it makes up for a rather bland game. It has amazing set pieces, but the filling is just stale.

Verdict: PASS