From Russia With Love Review

Gather around children, it's time for a review of a game based off an old movie from the '60s staring a man with an awesome accent. Yes, I am talking about James Bond: From Russia With Love. Ok, let's get to the point, this game is good and not what some would expect. This game is, like I said before, based off the 1963 movie with the same name, which was based off the 1957 novel with the same name by Ian Fleming. I haven't really seen the movie, so I can't tell you how close the story is to the movie, but from some other resources, they are saying it is not exact. So, on with the review.

The story is very complex and makes Russians look bad, but here it is. There is an organizations called OCTOPUS that want to kill James Bond or something like that, not a very specific story. They have an item James need to obtain with the help of a girl (secretly a spy luring him into a trap) named Tatiana Romanova. The thing is called the Luktor. There is also a man named Red Grant who protects you in the beginning but battles you a few times later.

The game is easy in the beginning but progressively gets harder and harder. Yo get to choose from three different difficulty levels, the highest being 00 Agents. Most of the levels are either escorting Tatiana, or getting something from a Russian base. You are constantly batting carbon copies of the same warrior over and over but you don't really care or notice very much. The normal warriors you battle are warriors usually equipted with weak machine guns and sometimes wear helmets. They are pretty easy to gun down, but there are sometimes a ton of them. There are a few more kinds of warriors including mine workers that look like truck drivers, some that hide behind metal sheilds, and these giant commandoes that have machines guns and take constant reloading to take down. I mean even a few blowes with a bazooka can't take down these guys, they kick ass. When they come near you, you yell, "Oh Crap!!!"

You get many guns and gadgets to help you with you missions from the Q-Copter, to the Laser Watch. The guns include a PP7 and some machine guns, a sniper rifle, bazooka, and shotgun. There is a pretty good and easy aiming system. You just press a button and it puts a big spinning circle with arrows on it around them that are color coded to how much health they have left. Green for a lot, yellow for ehh, he could take a little more gunfire, and Red for oh s**t boy you better run and hide behind a commando or I am going to blow you up, biach. With another hit of a button while aimed you can go to Bond Focus which puts circles around the weaker points of the enemy.

There are many vehicles in this game. There are special cars you drive with machine guns, there is this weird cart thingy, and a jetpack. You do do many vehicle missions and they are all fun to drive. Really good.

The graphics are great. James' facial features are great including all other characters, especially the mouth movements. The environments are realistic and you sometimes are so drawn in you forget it's a game. Really great.

You also collect skill points. I really didn't get what these did, but you collect them. They have Simple and Complex Schematics and other things that probably help you solve puzzles easier.

There are tons of unlockables from new guns, to levels. The unlockables are based on 4 things, their set ammount of guys you disarm during that level, the time they think would be a good time to finish that level, if you got the Bond Moment or not, and if the played the level in the 00 Agent level of difficulty. These are not easy to get. If you aren't the best gamer you can get about 1, 2 tops, but if you are good, you still are probably going to get about 3. They're pretty hard to get.

They pulled out a cast of most of the original actors from the movie to voice the characters in this game, including the original James Bond himself, Sean Connery. There are also two new characters not in the movie, one voiced by Natasha Bedingfield. So, it is pretty cool to see a cast like that.

There are only a few bad things about this game, the camera is a bit lose, but you get used to it, and the biggest problem, you can't skip the cutscenes. This doesn't get annoying if you play the game non-stop and finish it and don't play the level again. But if you turn off your Xbox in the middle of a level, then you have to watch the cut-scene all over, and then it gets annoying. If you play the game through in one sitting, then the cut-scenes are pretty fun to watch, especially hearing Sean Connery's accent (man, what a great accent.)

So overall, this game is great. Very fun, great graphics, awesome accent, great story, oooooh a good game. This game has been doubted by many, being a James Bond game, and some in the past have made some believe that if you played on Bond game, you've played them all. But no, this is pretty different. Again, bottom line, this game is really good. From Russia With Love gets 4 martinies, 'Shakin, not Stirred' out of 5.