About a week ago I stopped by the local used game store and found a copy of 007: Agent Under Fire for the Gamecube. Now, having played the game before it, The World Is Not Enough (N64), (Based off of the movie of the same name) and being an owner of the game after it, Nightfire (GCN), (Not based off the movie of the same name. If there is a movie called 'Nightfire') I figured I'd pick it up and add it to my game collection.
Oh dear god what have I done.
Okay, first off some background that I didn't know at the time. Agent under fire is actually what became of the planned PS2 & PC versions of TWINE. I guess they took too long, or too many liberties, and it kind of morphed into an original game instead of an alternate-console version of a movie game or something. It's also worth noting that the game itself is from just over a decade ago and uses a modified Quake III engine.
Neither of these things is a valid excuse.
It was pretty terrible. I'm not going to say it's the worst thing I've ever played, I've played a lot of crappy mods in my time, but for a commercial game, there are more than enough questionable design choices to put it down below par. Now, before I go and rip right into it, there are a couple things I feel I should mention: I am a James Bond fan. I enjoyed playing TWINE on the N64 and Nightfire on the gamecube. This means I SHOULD have a positive bias for the game, instead of a negative one against it. However, that doesn't mean I'm going to look the other way and ignore the poor quality of a game bearing the Bond name and the EA logo. I didn't even do that for Ricochet, and Valve is my favourite developer.
Okay, explanation done, into the things they did wrong.
For starters, the first thing that hit me was the poor UI. You cannot navigate the menus using the anolog stick. Your mission, whether or not you choose to accept it, is to use the control pad. It is MANDATORY. You also have to manually save your game; In most Gamecube games I've come across they do that automatically after each level once you've opened your profile.
What's an FPS without guns? Answer: Boring. Unfortunately, so are the guns in AUF. Most of them are highly nerfed from both a gameplay and realism standpoint, the bigger guns tend to have tiny reports instead of beefy blasts, and everything is as inaccurate as Fox News. Speaking of innacurate, the P2K (Or, as it's known in real life, Walther P99) has 6 rounds. (12 with the "Golden Clip" unlock) 6. Rounds. The PPK (Generally rebranded as the PP7 in Bond games) has 7 in it's standard .32 chambering. You want to know what the P99 has? 12 if you're using .40 bullets, and 15 if you're using the more common 9mm round. There is literally no reason to have it only hold 6 shots except to make it less useful to the player. Especially when it does a tiny amount of damage and has basically no reserve ammo. And has no suppressor in the first level. (Okay 007, you're going to covertly infiltrate this facility by making as much noise as humanly possible) Some of the other weapons are untrue to their real life versions as well, such as the AK-47 that does a miniscule amount of damage and fires very quickly or the Mp5 that can't hit anything. Aside from that, the animations are pretty undetailed, but I guess that's a factor of the era the game is from.
Your highly perceptive enemies, on the other hand, have no trouble using weapons, firing from the hip while moving with more accuracy than you get ever, all while shooting you in the face with their infinite ammo supply. Did I mention that each hit knocks the camera around? Hard to shoot them in the head (the only sure way to kill them in 5 shots or less) when they do that. Especially with the small hitboxes. They have pretty bad voice acting too, and only a few lines, none of which are context sensitive in terms of gameplay when they really should be.
"Get back here!"
"I'm standing still, dumbass."
Oh yeah, and they're psychic. Once they detect you, they track you through walls, shooting the entire time, only pausing to take cover. And they detect you a lot, at least when they're not having brainfarts, because they can hear the light footsteps of a highly trained secret agent from metres away unless you're crouching.
And nobody is going to crouch-walk much in this game, at least not the GCN version, because there's no toggle for it, and the position of the X button makes it hard to hold down while having fingers free to reload or shoot. Also, you can't strafe while aiming, which means you can't lean out of cover to line up a perfect, satisfying shot. Or aim at all, really, without being stationay and standing, because you can't aim from cover. There are also a couple of jumping puzzles that don't really work because of the floaty-yet low height jumping. Blame the level designers.
Who themselves have a lot to answer for. Clipped off railings prevent you from hopping down, things that should probably be breakable aren't, the levels are completely linear, and basically everything you interact with has the same flashing button texture. From a combat perspective, it's pretty poor as well, relying heavily on enemy spawns to provide gameplay. In the final level, there's actually a part where they rely on the old (and terrible) practice of infinite spawns to push the player towards their goal. Which is between the player's position and the spawnpoint.
The gadgetry you use to progress through the missions is decent, I guess, though the selection process for that is crap; It appears to be random, and you have to complete the draw animation and the holster animation before you can cycle to the next one. Which is logically bad, because for some inexplicable reason 80% of the gadgets are housed in the same mobile phone. "Let me just put my phone in my pocket and take it out again a few times, then I'll cut you free of this submarine before it submerges and drowns you." You also get a neat jetpack that lets you fly an incredible 6 feet up on a full tank of gas.
Finally, the story. It's a decent (if cliched) concept, a cloning conspiracy, but the writing is just...bad. The two writers (Citation: The credits) must have subscribed to Carmack's philosophy on plot in game; "It's expected to be there, but it's not that important" The cutscenes and dialog are cliched and cheesy where they're not blatantly sexist to an extent that is less Bond and more 10-year old boy who just discovered where babies come from. The character that SHOULD be a useful and strong asset, CIA Agent Zoe Nightshade, is constantly being captured, (one instance uses the classic 'dun-dun-DUN' stinger to further emphasize how unseriously this is being taken) and used as a sex object more often than an ally. (There's one instance where R, the vicarious narcissist who names every gadget after Q, uses a holographic emitter to project a nude copy of her into a shower. After she [SPOILER ALERT] dies two levels prior. [END SPOILER] Then you have your villans; Bloch and Malprave, neither of whom really have any motivations behind their plot besides world domination, or any real backstory. Bloch also has the unfortunate habit of being a totally unoriginal and repeditive guy, helpfully reminding you periodically that You're a dead man mister Bond, in between bouts of maniacal laughing. (Bloch is, of course, a user of the tried and true Muah-ha-ha method.)
I'm not even going to get into the multiplayer. It's only worth mentioning because it exists and it's bad.
All in all, Agent Under Fire is frustrating, poorly written and acted, and wholly unsatisfying. I realize that I'm being a bit harsh on a game from 2002, but there's no excuse for a GCN/PS2 game to play like a bad N64 game, and especially no excuse for the poor decisions and lack of effor throughout. I can only assume that the developers of Agent Under Fire went on to develop the PC version of Nightfire, which I hear was also poor quality, used Nightshade as a sex object instead of a capable person, and ran on the Goldsource engine. (They must have enjoyed Ricochet, though from the lack of crouch-jumping or intelligent AI indicates they never played Half-Life)
Well, at least I only paid 1/6 of the original retail price by waiting so long to buy it used. Slightly cheaper than going to the movies. Of course, don't let this review stop you from trying the game; I'm just one man, after all, and a lot of other reviewers thought it was quite good.
