There’s a level where you ride a Daytona bike over rooftops before drifting through a gap in a waterfall and then skydiving over a mountain to save Shannen Elizabeth – who’s been thrown out of a helicopter – while the Bond theme blares. When you finally catch her, Pierce smirks “Nice to catch up with you!” before swinging away on a grappling gun… GoldenEye be damned, this is the definitive James Bond game.

Jettisoning the first-person obsession of its predecessors, EoN finally allows the player to see 007 in the frame, allowing for a greater diversity of gameplay, encompassing shooting, cover, stealth, driving (cars, helicopters, motorbikes and a tank) and the kind of madcap stunts you’d expect from a Bond movie. Good old Pierce finally gave the full martini – lending his luscious likeness and voracious voice work in what would ultimately be his final dalliance with Double O duty (as a year or so later – to paraphrase Timothy Dalton – he got the boot). Series veteran Judi Dench returns as does John Cleese as the new Q, who sometimes feels like he had more to do in these games than he ever did in his brief film appearances. A mo-capped Willem Dafoe (!) plays Bond’s nemesis Nikolai Diavolo with enough vim and vigour to rival the best of the onscreen baddies – he’s undoubtedly the very best of a fairly faceless bunch of game antagonists.

Other levels see you piloting explosive robot spiders through underground soviet bases and rappelling down the sides of buildings while dodging bazooka fire…it’s the only game I’ve ever played that truly has the breathtaking, breakneck feel of a bonkers Roger Moore Bond movie like The Spy Who Loved Me. With its bananas nanotech plot, invisibility suits and the aforementioned Q-spiders the game pushes the franchise farther into true science fiction than it’s ever been (Die Another Day undoubtedly providing this creative licence) but strangely, it works because it’s a video game and not a film. I really love the idea of John Cleese sitting in a recording booth shouting about shield generators for £1,000 a sentence.

Clever level design and enemy placement means you must carefully assess the situation, using a combination of gadgets, fists, guns and wits (as well as carefully rationed armour drops and limited ammo) to outsmart your enemies. It’s a similar feeling to having to think like Batman in the Arkham games. The enemy AI is prehistoric and the controls are a bit creaky by 2020 standards – lock-on aiming is mandatory and stiff, which can lead to some clumsy encounters with enemies who come around corners at precisely the wrong moment, leaving you powerless to shoot someone at point blank range…this is a small complaint though. For a seventeen year-old game, it holds up remarkably well.

Look, let me just say that this game has fulfilled my lifelong dream of seeing Willem Dafoe playing a Bond villain, and I think that's a beautiful thing. The game itself has its moments, but it is brought down by a very iffy lock-on system that acts like it has a mind of its own at points which isn't helped by the lack of ammo you are dealt making the game way harder than it should be at points and the lack of checkpoints makes it feel way too much like trial and error. If you're a Bond fan, you'll probably appreciate the fan service along with Pierce reprising his role, but I just found this way too frustrating to be enjoyable.

This is, without a doubt, the best campaign of any Bond game. The presentation and the third-person action both knock it out of the park. The variety of gadgets is beyond any other entry in the franchise. The levels feature engaging, memorable set pieces. Willem Defoe is the villain! The co-op is also rock-solid, and is a completely different storyline from the single player campaign, featuring random no-name agents.

The biggest flaw of this game is that the competitive multiplayer is LAAAAAME. Instead of a split-screen mode, this has some nonsensical isometric view of a single room, which feels more like Mario Party than Bond. In all likelihood, if you're picking this game up now, you're not looking for deathmatches, so it doesn't take make a huge difference anymore, but it was a serious disappointment at launch.

I’m not really a James Bond fan, but I can’t help but pass up a good action game no matter what the license is. Everything or Nothing is based off the film when Pierce Brosnan was still the famous spy, and Everything or Nothing is pretty solid. The story is pretty nonsensical and is your typical Bond plot with a bad guy (Willam Defoe) hell-bent on ruling the world. Diavolo has nano-mites that can eat through metal and plans on attaching payloads of this stuff on nukes. Bond runs into henchman (Jaws) and beautiful women to stop the evil mad man.

The best part about the are the vehicle sections, and the shooting sections are hard as all hell and mundane. I’m going to throw that out there right now. The vehicle sections have Bond driving real-world vehicles with missiles, machine guns, flame throwers, and oil slicks attached to them. What makes the driving sections so grand is the sense of speed. Driving across a bridge, jumping through signs, finding shortcuts to trigger “Bond Moments”. While these are hard to find (even in on foot sections) they can be satisfying. Every driving section is different from escorts to flying over rooftops to races. All vehicles handle very well even at high speeds and this is what truly matters.


The on foot sections are mundane and extremely frustrating. Even on the easiest setting, the game throws dozens of bad guys at you and ammo is a loot and hunt type thing. You start out with a puny P99 pistol and the game throws about 10 bad guys at you. The lock on feature is clumsy since you can’t lock on unless the camera is facing an enemy. If you get close enough to someone Bond will put his gun away and start meleeing while other guys around him are shooting. This can make you die in very tight spots. The melee is pretty basic with heavy and light punches along with counters. You can hide behind cover, but this tends to be a problem if the cover is taller than Bond can shoot.


You can use a lot of gadgets, but they tend to be useless unless the level requires them. You get Q spiders which are remotely operated spiders that can blow the thing up and go inside little nooks. The coin grenades are pretty straightforward, but have crappy physics and bounce around like rubber balls. There’s the nano suit which makes you invisible, but I never even had to use this since stealth in this game is very hard and almost not an option. The rappel gun is what I used most. Being a Bond game I wish the gadgets would have come in handier, but they are they if you really want to use them. The shooting sections are just so frustrating due to the unbalanced difficulty. I died over 10 times on certain missions, and there are no checkpoints. Some of the longer levels have one, but most levels have none and this can make you throw your controller across the room.

The graphics are pretty decent for a 2004 PS2 game. The textures are solid, the audio is nice, and there are only slight framerate problems due to the PS2’s limitations. There is online co-op, but this will never be tested since the servers were shut down. There’s a lot of missions in this game, and it will keep you busy for a good 8-10 hours depending on how many times you die. The game is pretty solid and you won’t be disappointed. Even people who don’t like Bond can enjoy this game and that’s the beauty of it.