Oh Look, Another Vertical Shooter

We’re not quite done with the Domark 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. video games, but we are steadily coming towards its close. After this we’ll have a couple of efforts from other companies before Domark takes their final bow (and before Rare comes on the scene to blow every other preceding game away with Goldeneye 007), but we still one more regular old vertical shooter to get through because, yeah, Domark has seemingly learned that the best game they can put out on PCs with the James Bond license is a vertical shooter.

The Spy Who Loved Me (based on the film of the same name from the Roger Moore era) was developed by The Kremlin and published by Domark. It features a similar kind of mix of gameplay elements that Domark and Quixel’s previous effort, 007: Licence to Kill, had. Your character hops into a vehicle and for a stage that is what you do. You drive north and shoot while avoiding obstacles, or you sail your boat north and shoot while avoiding obstacles, or maybe, via your sub-car, you motor your way underwater north and shoot while avoiding obstacles. You get the idea. This is a game with a few different play modes, but almost all of them involve going north and shooting. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as some great arcade-style titles have been built around “go north and shoot”. This game just doesn’t do enough to really stand out from the crowd.

The game lightly adapts The Spy Who Loved Me, which features James teaming up with a Russian spy, Anya, to take on an evil mastermind, Karl Stromberg. The game starts you off in a car, letting you drive up towards a meeting at a hotel. You’ll want to drive carefully as the road is filled with hazards and if you end up going offroad, or hitting obstacles, you’ll take damage. Get damaged enough and your car explodes, sending you back to the start of the mission. Clear through the road to the docks and you’ll get transferred to a boat where you’ll have to blast away at enemies sent to kill you while navigating the treacherous waters.

Survive all that and it’s on to the next mission with more time spent in your car (including earning the money to buy a submarine upgrade for the vehicle) before jumping it into the water to take on Stromberg’s underwater forces. This leads you towards Stromberg’s secret underwater base where he has two captured military subs he plans to use to cause a war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. (you know, that old story). James and Anya have to survive the onslaught of enemies (in a first person shooting gallery sequence) before it’s back on the boat for another journey across the sea. One last stop in Stromberg’s final base, with another shooting sequence, and both Stromberg and his lieutenant, Jaws, will be dispatched. Just try to keep Anya alive in the process…

The game is functional. At its core it’s far more focused on vehicular action than straight shooting. Your vehicles get weapons and upgrades, but a lot of the action feels very empty, like you don’t really have to engage with it if you don’t want to. Avoiding enemies and ignoring the damage you take is a variable strategy much of the time, especially with power-ups flowing pretty freely throughout the stages. It’s a shooting game, in effect, that doesn’t seem to care that much about the shooting.

Some of this might just come down to the way the game is designed. It feels like The Kremlin really wanted to make something akin to SpyHunter, but they weren’t quite up to the design style of that game. That was an arcade-style vehicle action game, and a fun one, but it was very tightly tuned to a couple of specific action styles. The Spy Who Loved Me is more varied, maybe too varied, and it feels like it doesn’t quite know where to place the emphasis or how to keep the action flowing in a cohesive manner.

The best part of the game are the car driving sequences. These are fun, with a car that feels tight and responsive going over roads that are twisty and varied. There’s a lot of obstacles to avoid, enemies to battle, and power-ups to collect, and it all leads to a fun and frenetic experience. Sadly there are only two driving sections in the game and they both come early, making the front half of the game far more interesting than the back half.

The boat sections are fine, but they show a lack of care for action that feels like the designers didn’t quite understand what they were making. The boat doesn’t control as well as the car, and there are times where the stages force you to lose lives simply because you chose the wrong path (without warning), which is always an aggravating experience. The action also doesn’t feel right, with the weapons providing little in the way of feedback to let you know if you’re really damaging the enemies or just plinking off them. Although considering it feels like their weapons plink off of you, maybe that was a deliberate choice.

The worst of the vehicle sections is the one submarine stage. That one feels slower, with a larger, chunkier vehicle plodding under the waves while slower, bigger enemies drive along beside. This section doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the above water boat sections, except that the graphics are different, and it really makes you wish this stage were another driving section, or a boat section, that felt tighter and more responsive. This level is a chore to get through, with boring action that fails to entertain.

And then, for some reason, there are two shooting gallery sections. These aren’t really that interesting because they’re basically a test of your mouse-based twitch reflexes. A light gun shooting gallery can be fun, but mouse-based ones generally aren’t, and these two sections certainly fail on that front. The enemies only have a couple of spawn points to emerge from, and their attacks are slow. You could quite literally memorize their patterns and get through these sections with your brain almost entirely off, which doesn’t really speak well for the action.

Honestly, with The Spy Who Loved Me it feels like Domark and The Kremlin maybe bit off a little bit too much. I appreciate the varied gameplay (which is something I wished Domark would do more in their earlier titles) and I can respect the ambition on display here. The Kremlin tries to up the ante after the decent (if not fantastic) 007: License to Kill, and I appreciate what they tried to do. In the end, though, this game doesn’t feel polished enough to really work on all fronts. Something a little more focused, with just the car and boat sections, might have worked better. Then, at least, the two portions of the game that functioned the best could have gotten the time and care they deserved. This is another noble effort from Domark, if not a particularly good one.