The voices of Daniel Craig and Judi Dench add familiarity to the cast, while the brisk cutscenes do a good job of capturing the detached, no-nonsense demeanor of Craig-era James Bond.ĬPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.80 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ 2.0 GHzĬPU: Core i3-530 2. At any given point, you might find yourself amid a gunfight in Monaco taking cover behind a craps table speeding your Aston Martin across the cracking ice sheets of a frozen Siberian river or darting across the rain-slick rooftops of Bangkok not five minutes after gazing at majestic humpback whales inside an aquarium.
Blur, and James Bond 007: Blood Stone shop. It's a story that succeeds not because of any emotional connection to the proceedings, but because of the sheer variety of situations Bond winds up in. PC versions of Activisions James Bond games have been removed from digital sale on Steam, Xbox 360 Games on Demand and Activisions own web store. You begin the game on a hunt to track down a weapons dealer bent on terrorizing the G20 Summit, but a tangled conspiracy sends Bond all over the globe tracking down the usual array of informants, turncoats, and crime lords. There's no hiding the fact that the events driving Blood Stone's narrative are paint-by-numbers James Bond. The result is an uneven yet worthwhile James Bond experience, aided in no small part by stellar production values that make it easy to forget that this Bond story isn't tied to a new movie.
Such woes don't last forever, though, because the invigorating energy of that opening scene returns full force in the latter half of the adventure.
What follows is a game that takes its sweet time stepping outside the shadow of this explosive prologue, as a number of early levels fall prey to flat pacing and drab, predictable level design. Going from silently dropping enemies on a ritzy yacht right into a pair of harrowing chase scenes-first by boat on the Mediterranean and then by car on the streets of Athens-this third-person action game from Bizarre Creations makes a thoroughly memorable first impression. Like a great Bond movie, James Bond 007: Blood Stone jumps headfirst into a spectacular action scene before the opening credits even roll.