Original Release: EA, 2000, PlayStation
A game that’s all about 007 in various vehicles, somehow it ends up feeling more like a clumsy shooter half the time.
007 Racing (PS1, EA, 2000)
Where to Buy: ebay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
If the title has given you visions of kart racing with Oddjob and Rosa Klobb, get that right out of your head, you’re not gonna be having any fun here. EA’s vision of a Jamesh Bond driving game is pretty much a linear series of levels a la Driver, just with weapons and gadgets (and made with the Need For Speed engine).
You’d think chase and race scenes would be the way they would go … and these things do happen on occasion, but more often you’re in some weird Goldeneye-style level (played from behind the wheel of a blocky-ass car). Either that, or it’s the most obnoxious mission types of the GTA games (ex: timed checkpoints, the first of which seems like it was ripped straight from the Die Hard 3 part of Die Hard Trilogy).
Though it’s in the Pierce Brosnan era the plot isn’t based on any of the movies, an entirely new story plays out between levels in cinematics reminiscent of the two Dukes of Hazzard games for the system. But while the first Dukes game had some heart and the original actors providing voices for something that actually approximated an episode, you get a more cornball plot here and the only returning actor is John Cleese as Q. Who is heard but never seen, the actors that ARE seen (Brosnan and Judi Dench) have their likenesses in-game but apparently were too steep a bill for a voice recording session. You get some poor impressions of them instead. And in the in-game cinemas 007 actually looks like something halfway between Brosnan and a Ham Bambara.
Some levels have a decent level of background detail for PS1 standards (albeit with a bunch of tearing, pop-in and awful-looking human models) and rollicking big band Bond music, but that’s about the nicest thing I can say about this crapfest. Otherwise it’s a clumsy mess with kinda inexplicable direction, like I don’t know how the “let’s make a shooter with a racing engine” concept managed to make it all the way to a final retail product.
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