Mild Adventuring Action

The Roger Moore era of James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. wasn’t very good. I know he has his fans, but Roger Moore was the weakest Bond in the set for me. He was too goofy, too silly, and most of his stories didn’t feel like the caliber of adventures for a secret agent (dressing up as a clown in Octopussy was the last straw for me). He was, however, the guy leading the franchise during the rise of video games, so it’s no surprise there are a lot of games based on his movies. We already saw one, James Bond 007, which tackled four simple missions from his films, and now we have another, based on his last movie, A View to a Kill. And like Roger Moore’s character, it kind of sucks.

Look, I don’t want to be too harsh on this game. It came out in the early days of video game home consoles (well, okay, not too early as the NES also came out this same year, and the Famicom had been out for two years already) but it’s pretty clear that while the hardware used for this game (released for the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, Oric, ZX Spectrum) wasn’t exactly up to the task, the programmers didn’t really do themselves any favors either. The game tries, sure, but it has a segmented play style, with missions that are both too simple and too complex, that, in the end, feels like it simply was too ambitious for the skill of the programmers and the aging hardware.

Aging hardware. Like Roger Moore himself in A View to a Kill. Oooh, burn.

The game starts you off driving a little car around the streets of Paris. May Day the evil henchwoman from this movie) is parachuting in and you have to catch her. With your car. I mean, sure, it’s James Bond so this makes as much sense as anything. As you drive around the top-down streets (although you do also get a little 3D dungeon-crawl perspective off to the side) you have to shoot at cop cars trying to stop you, and track May Day as she slowly drifts around the city. Catch her at the designated spot before time ends and you get to move on.

This mission is pretty bad. Paris in the game isn’t complex, just a small collection of city blocks set at perpendicular angles. There are some twists and turns in the road, but the basic controls aren’t bad and there aren’t a lot of dangers around for you to stress about. It’s basic driving, like you’d see on any old console of this era, and trying to figure out where May Day is drifting to. It’s simple, rote, and it ends as soon as you get a handle on the streets. This feels like filler more than a real mission, and yet it just goes on and on, for twenty-ish minutes, until you can finally end it.

The second mission puts Bond at the top of a burning building. He has to track through the building, finding keys and other items that will help him escape, all so he can get to the bottom and save Stacey Sutton (the other Bong girl from the film). As you’re moving through the building the fire will slowly (very slowly) move towards you. Exploration is key as you never know what room will have something useful, some item you’ll need (or even need to come back for) to be able to escape the building alive.

This mission is better than the driving section, although only by degrees. The basic idea of navigating the large building, room by room, isn’t bad. Hell, the basic mechanics of it remind me a lot of Spy vs. Spy, going around in faux 3D rooms, finding items and weapons, trying to navigate the maze. It’s not bad in that regard. The issue is that the building itself is huge, and complex, and what you need to get where you’re going doesn’t always make sense. It doesn’t help that on the various basic hardware options, the graphics are bland and simple, with the various items (like many different keys) and doors all being single colors. You generally have to find the right color key for the right color door to get into the next area. If you’re colorblind (which I’m not) this would be a nightmare. Even if you can see what you’re doing, though, the gameplay loop feels uninspired. A smaller building, with a little less complexity, wouldn’t have drawn this out so much.

That, or the game could have included some enemies to fight, Spy vs. Spy-style. If you’re going to mimic the mechanics, you may as well go all the way. Some more action certainly would have livened things up.

Finally, the last section sees Bond infiltrating the caverns under the control of Max Zorin. The villain has a bond in the cavern set to blow and Bond has to find the supplies, and the code, to stop the bomb. Zorin has also locked May Day behind a stone wall in the complex as well and Bond has to find a way to save her so that she can help him defuse the bomb. If he can do all that he can stop Zorin’s plan and save the day. Peace and justice and all that for the British way of life, or something.

This third section reminded me a fair bit of Prince of Persia (the original one) or Another World, except without any of the actual danger in those games. You control Bond, platforming through the various areas of the cavern, jumping over pits and climbing ropes, while you investigate around looking for items you need to reach further sections of the cavern. There’s no enemies for you to fight in here, though, and you don’t take any damage from falls, so Bond can hilariously drop from the top of the cavern all the way down and be just fine. He even does it acrobatically, which is so silly.

The basics of this section aren’t hard, since there’s no real danger. You simply have to find all you need to get May Day, get to the bomb, and defuse it. You have an hour to do it and while the cavern is complex, once you know where to go and what to do, it’s not too hard to get it all done with plenty of time to spare. Again, I have to wonder why they didn’t put in any enemies to fight or real dangers to deal with (at least, not on the ZX Spectrum version I played for this review) as the basic action, free of any danger, is pretty boring.

The biggest frustration, in both the second and third missions that make up this game, is that the interface for items is really bad. I get that the ZX Spectrum didn’t have the best control scheme, basically being a dressed up computer with a keyboard, but there had to be more they could do than a clunky, one-button confirm/back control scheme. It was annoying to use, and slow to maneuver, making me wish they’d tried even a little harder to get this working well. It was functional, but only by degrees.

I get the vibe that the makers at Domark saw the unofficial Shaken but Not Stirred and liked the idea of three different types of game play with three different perspectives, and wanted to do something official and licensed. The trick was that game (also put out on the ZX Spectrum, I’ll note) was designed to work with the hardware and not against it. This game tried too much, pushing the dinky ZX Spectrum too far, and the game just couldn’t really work with their ambitions. I appreciate the effort but certainly not the execution.