Two-thirds of the title is accurate.
PlatformOVERALL
Xbox 3607.00
Overall 7.00
I could save your time and mine by summarizing Rare's Xbox 360 FPS by conjuring up what I assume Microsoft told the developer a month before the game's release, "We don't care if it's not finished, we need a f***ing FPS for launch!" Indeed, it has since been revealed that the pressing of discs started five days before Microsoft had finished certification on the game.

In this prequel to Perfect Dark, Joanna, in her pre-Carrington Institute form is not the controlled profesional found in Perfect Dark, but rather would make a perfect 6th member of the Spice Girls. Fortunately, from the first-person perspective you don't have to dwell on this often, but during cut-scenes there are plentiful lingering shots of her feminine form in outfits straight out of 1998.

Setting aside character development and story, the game-play itself is unsatisfying.  The weapons (you are limited to four) lack any of punch and weight of those found in GoldenEye.  As with GoldenEye, you barely aim when shooting, and while that was made up for with a heighted difficulty in the aforementioned in this game no such calibration is made, making the shooting not much of a challenge.

Not that the impact of the weapons matter given the fish-eyed enemy AI found in the game.  

The settings are quite good, and diverse, providing the main strength of the game, but the levels found within those settings are directionless.  The option to include a "where-to-next" pointer is a concession from Rare that without it, you'd get lost endlessly.

The visuals and physics are quite impressive, for the time, though the character models are poor, often looking robotic or like rubber dolls.

No innovation is to be found in the game. In the tutorial they show you how to use a remote-controlled droid to explore parts of a level, this is used only *one* other time in the rest of the game (these must have been the levels provided to previewers).

The final boss is the most disappointing part of the game.  You are placed on a platform that floats in the air and essentially, all you have to do is shoot your opponent as he flits about on other platforms about 200 meters away. Occasionally he comes to your platform, where you wail away on him until he dies.

Having now played GoldenEye 007 (N64) I can see many positive similarities with the source material, but for the most part it is an unfinished game at worst and a tech-demo for the 360 at best.
Posted by aspro Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:08:29
 
Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:27:23
You made it to the final boss. Plus one for effort.

I gave up midway and it still taunts me from the shelf. Edgecrusher loves this game.
 
Thu, 09 Dec 2010 10:20:28
Why aren't there more comments here? Heathens. Raven played this right?
 
Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:03:10
I *can* see how if you got this at launch and you had paid full-price for it you could be sympathetic to the faults of the game.  Like I said in the review it's a tech demo, so there were plenty of visual effects that hadn't been seen on a console before.
 
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:07:38
My problem was the game had no character, it shat up with cutesy characters, changed Joanna into an amercian voiced toon. The controls were way off, the level design was amaterurish, 3rd persons sections should not have been in the game. It just felt shoddy overall.
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