After GoldenEye and the Game Boy games, the Bond license moved from Nintendo to Electronic Arts, with their first game based on the film Tomorrow Never Dies and developed by Black Ops Entertainment.

While with GoldenEye, I recreated something close to the original experience, I want to give the other games the best chance possible, so I played games in emulators with improved resolution, widescreen and adjusting the controls to be more comfortable.

Tomorrow Never Dies is a third person shooter with a focus on auto aim (although the auto aim is deliberately inaccurate). You can manually aim, but it’s very slow. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t take advantage of the DualShock controller, instead oping to focus entirely on the original controller. While it’s understandable they didn’t want to prevent anyone from playing, it’s a shame that they didn’t support additional options. The original control scheme uses X to shoot and the shoulder buttons to strafe, but I managed to make a more comfortable control scheme more like a standard third person shooter, just without the ability to look up and down.

The first level has you fight through a snow base and target a communications tower by targeting it with a special camera (the best gadget use in the game), then escape by skiing down the mountain. The skiing is awkward but not terrible, although both Bond’s and the enemies attacks of flailing their arms looks absolutely pitiful.

The health bar was an issue for me, I’m colourblind and could not make out any visual differences as I took damage. The life system is also a bit strange: you have limited lives and when you die, you just flash and carry on from exactly where you were. Each mission has one extra life hidden in it.

After this first mission, you have a mission where you take pictures of some machinery and steal a jet (which I got in an it span around oddly until the mission ended). The missions in this game are fairly short and there are only 10 in the game. After the end of this mission, it cuts to a clip of the film, followed by the full opening credits, featuring the song from the film. I always found that the movie clips makes the game feel more disjointed, especially as everyone’s voices sounds different due to different voice actors.

The next two missions are also fairly simple: obtaining information form Carver’s Media building and newspaper press. Gadgets are pretty much keycards, and you just shoot your way through the levels, even though the mission briefing implies stealth, other than manually aiming and shooting before the enemy is fully rendered, there is none.

The next level is about rescuing and protecting Carver’s wife, here you are introduced to the game’s boss fights (they all work like this). You have to dodge their main attacks while either using an immense amount of ammo, or risk manually aiming for a headshot to take off a decent amount. It’s not an enjoyable way to do boss fights at all, and they’re all the same except for different projectiles.

Next up is the game’s best mission: a car chase where you have to blow up an enemy convoy. It’s very basic, and like many other missions, is incredibly short, but it manages to not be frustrating and the handling is passable enough to have a bit of fun.

This is followed immediately by another skiing mission that ends in a boss fight, before you infiltrate Carver’s headquarters, get captured and escape with Wai Lin – who has not been seen or mentioned at all in this game until she randomly appears when Bond gets captured. Without knowing the plot of the film quite well, you would be lost playing the game.

While she randomly turned up at the end of the previous mission without being seen or mentioned previously, you now get to play as Wei Lin for a mission. M explains that she can’t send Bond as the guards have been ordered to shoot him on sight, so while playing as Wei, you turn around a corner and immediately get shot at by guards, so having Bond sent would have made no difference.

She gets to fight a boss to get a rocket launcher and then use that to fight a helicopter, before having to decode information (done via a simple Mastermind-style minigame). This is the most action-spy level of the game, and Bond isn’t even part of it.

Now you’re onto the final level, which has a confusing layout and lots of corridors that look exactly the same. You have to stop Carver from launching a nuke, and he is as strong as all the other bosses in the game. After you defeat him, you have to quickly cancel the nuclear launch then escape the boat.

If you’re not playing on the hardest difficulty you’ll then get a message: finish on 00 Agent mode to get unlock the final cutscene. This is the only unlockable of the game, and if you trudge through the hardest difficulty, you’ll unlock this final cutscene: a two second long clip from the film of the boat exploding, followed by random clips of previous missions. It’s such a hilariously bad reward.

There’s no fun unlockables, no difference other than enemy health and damage between difficulties and no multiplayer. It’s a very short, bare bones games and isn’t even a fun one.

Let me first say that I have not watched the movie, most of the pre-2000s 007 movies are a blind spot to me. So I'll be talking about the game with limited context.

TND is one of those games that is so visibly hampered by a lack of ideas. The game is pretty short, but it barely has any variety in its gameplay. Just keep running around while shooting everything in sight. You have a silenced pistol as a starter weapon, but it barely matters since trying to stealth kill with the clunky controls are an absolute hassle, and it is usually not rewarded accordingly, since the other enemies will most often instantly know whenever one of their mates die. There are a couple skiing sections here and there, but they're horrendous. In the second half of the game, they also throw in a couple "bosses", which are boring/annoying bullet sponges with minimal differences to regular enemies in terms of how they attack you. They will probably drain you of your medkits and extra lifes just to make you replay the whole level all over again.

It also doesn't help that the difficulty progression is done lazily. Enemies in the later levels will hit you faster and with more damage, which is annoying, since the limited draw distance gives them the advantage, and there's a lot of moments where they can just decimate your health before you can even react. For example, when you're opening a door and the enemy behind it is already shooting you before the game's aiming system locks in.

It's not to say that I didn't have fun with the game. I actually enjoyed about 60% of the game, where you're not dealing with the game's pitiful attempts of varying things up. The gunplay is objectively clunky, with its tank controls and limited capability to aim, but it still feels satisfying, mostly because of the inherently fun concept of quickly reacting to enemies. There's also good variety in the level environments (although gameplay-wise they have to adhere to the limitations set by the wieldy controls), and the soundtrack is actually pretty great.

All in all, TND is mostly average, with the occasional flashes of frustratingly punishing moments. Can only recommend it to 007-heads and if you're a console/gamepad shooter freak like me (─‿─)

A very weird TPS where you seemingly control Bond, but you are secretly a tank that has the turning speed of a turtle who just turned 100 this year.

The camera is very janky, the shooting lacks response and some of the levels are beyond abysmal. However, I cannot deny that the game has some charm to it, as the main menu is stylish, the soundtrack is good and some very short levels are decent, as you feel like they are bite-sized action packed levels. There are also vehicle segments, which are just there to be honest. The convoy one is very short, and unfair, and I hated everything about it, but I cannot tell you that they did not try to spice up things.

Bad outing for the first EA James Bond but it does fall really short with what came before it.

Tomorrow Never Dies is a serviceable game albeit some tweaks in its settings and having a Analog Stick Controller. It super unfortunate that this game had come out after Goldeneye and how massive its influence was for shooters in general and makes it really hard to not compare to the two but I will try my best to keep Tomorrow Never Dies in it own lane compared to Goldeneye.

Gameplay wise, it really feels like a cheap knock off of Syphon filter at times. Considering SF came out months before Tomorrow Never Dies you can tell there was some influence and groundwork of inspiration which falls flat due to its camera, clipping and poor collision with enemies. I felt like it a situation of "Hey can I copy your homework?" Sure just make it look different do that it doesn't look like you just copied it" situation. The shooting was really abysmal at times and never locked on to who I wanted to and the zoom in was just as frustrating due to its slow turn speed. Was not a fan of it. Runtime of the levels I was able to beat in like a 4 hour sitting. It was pretty short. 10 missions, I would say the last 3 levels offer a challenge to the player. That is where I would say I had to use some of the "Lives" the game offers. The game also offers, Skiing and Driving which are legit only like 2-5 minutes of game time and they had the audacity to make it big feature in the Jewel case lol. Got a chuckle for sure out of me. I felt like they could have done so much more with these sections to make them feel unique.

It's story or lack there of (unless you have seen the movie), just uses Clips to move it story along. I feel like if you have not seen Tomorrow never dies, you would be super confused. That's all there really is to say about the story. In short Clips from the film are shown after each level to advance the story.

Where Tomorrow Never Dies exceeds is its Soundtrack. I was actually pausing my game at times to listen to the whole sound. It was that good considering this came from the PS1, I had to check who made this and it seems like Tommy Tallarico was the mastermind behind this Soundtrack. He puts out some absolute BANGERs and actual respect to the bond theme not gonna lie. I would certainly go out of my way to listen to this OST. It's that good. I give it some brownie points in this department for the OST.

Overall, I would really avoid this game unless you are a bond fan or a curious Syphon Filter fan. There is alot of drawbacks to this game but in hindsight it was a first step for EA for much more to come. There are some enjoyable moments but overall you are setting yourself up for a mediocre/bad time. Just play it if you are curious but overall I think its bad.