This One Should Never Have Been Allowed to Live

Watching back through the various 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. films, it’s pretty clear that while Bond does action from time to time, action isn’t his primary modus operandi. He’s a secret agent (who doesn’t do a very good job being secret about it) and stealth, counter intelligence, and running ops is actually more important to the characters and his action than the few action set pieces in the films. Action is part of it, but it’s not the whole of it.

This is something video games, especially early video games, struggle with. It’s hard to find that right balance between the “secret agent” side of Bond and all the cool action he’s more known for. Everyone seems to want to play Bond when he’s getting into shootouts, skiing down mountains, and flying helicopters, but all those other moments in the films aren’t what players seemingly were looking for. They didn’t want to be secret agents, they wanted to be commandos. Or, at least, that’s what many games would have you believe.

The Living Daylights, released the same year as the film of the same name, certainly seems to think all we care about is the action in a James Bond adventure. It’s a platform shooter that puts all the emphasis on the shooting. While Bond is certainly known for all kinds of action, this game doesn’t care about that. You’re here to walk, shoot, and kill bad guys until the game says you’re done. Is that a simple gameplay loop to make? Absolutely, but it doesn’t exactly lead to a thrilling video game experience, no matter how you cut it.

In The Living Daylights you take on the role of (Timothy Dalton’s) Bond, set on a task of tracking down and taking out the villain, Whitaker. To do this you have to walk, from left to right, across a variety of stages, from a training range to a theater house, Tangiers, Afghanistan, and finally the villain’s own mansion, shooting at anything that looks dangerous. Shoot them before they shoot you and you survive. Let them kill you then, well, you’re a bad secret agent and you’re not completing this mission, James.

The mechanics of the game are pretty simple. As Bond your character walks down a linear path, left to right, through the various stages. Your cursor, when it sits at the right edge of the stage, moves James forward. With the press of keys you can make Bond roll or jump to avoid obstacles and other dangers. Your job (in most stages) is to get from one end of a prescribed area to the other before you run out of health. There’s no time limit, just your own skill with a gun and ability to defend yourself as well as you can.

Of course, as you’re going along there will be bad guys that try to get in your way. The earliest stage has you shooting paintballs at other agents putting you through your paces (at least until the end of the training stage when a real bad guy shows up that you have to kill with a real gun). The theater house then puts a lot of civilians in the way that you want to shoot but shouldn’t. However, when the bad guys show up they’re colored differently so it’s easier to see who they are. Shoot them, not the other people, so you stay alive.

Past these first stages, though, you can shoot at anything that moves because everyone is a bad guy. To shoot you move your cursor away from the edge of the screen and over one of the enemies. Hit a key to fire at them, taking them out. Killing them isn’t necessarily required as, in most stages, all you have to do is get to the other end. But since the bad guys are shooting at you, and doing damage to your health bar, it’s generally better to kill them before they kill you. Maybe that’s not the most secretive way to handle the matter, but it is the most effective.

As you’re going between stages you’re given the option to take a secondary weapon or other item with you. Trial and error will prove to be the most useful here as, on your first pass, you won’t realize that you should take a hardhat into a factory where guys are throwing objects at your head, or that you need a bazooka to take out helicopters in another zone. If you don’t take the right item your game will be a lot harder (although maybe not impossible if you play it right). Take the right item, though, and you’ll have a significantly easier time in the stage.

There are two boss fights in the game that marginally change the play experience. One is set at a carnival and you have to shoot all the balloons out of the air that a performer is throwing at you, and if you take a crossbow for this stage you’ll be far better off. The other boss is the big villain, Whitaker, and he’ll throw objects at your legs and head that you have to avoid while shooting him down. Just keep firing and, generally speaking, you’ll be fine.

And, really, that’s it. That’s all there is to this game. Six short stages where all you do is walk and shoot, and two boss fights where you stand around and shoot. Even casually you can get through this game in less than fifteen minutes, and once you’ve gone through one loop there’s very little impetus to do it again. The game is pretty tightly set, with enemies showing up in the same spots at the same time. You could practice it to get better and faster, or to try and get a higher score, but there’s little incentive to do that.

Really, all you’re getting here is a set of samey stages all largely doing the same thing, with the same action over and over again. Even the boss fights, which ostensibly break up the action, are little more than the same thing packaged in a slightly different way. It would have been interesting to have some other game modes here, maybe a stage set in a car, or maybe a chase sequence mirroring the cello case pursuit from the film. None of the major set pieces make it into the game, it’s just walk and shoot, walk and shoot.

Of course, I do understand why this wasn’t done. The publisher, Domark, had previously released A View to a Kill and that game, with its multiple gameplay modes, was panned by audiences (even if it did sell well). They wanted a more focused, tighter experience so they went with a single walk-and-shoot gameplay loop. While that would lead to a tighter experience, yes, the gameplay still needs something more to it than this. We need more than walking and shooting, just to keep things interesting

Honestly, it makes for a pretty boring experience. While I like the creativity of the mechanics, being able to functionally play this game one handed with a cursor, it just doesn’t have enough meat on it. It’s a very basic, very tedious game that wears out its welcome before you’re even through the first couple of stages. It may only take fifteen minutes to clear the game but I bet, after less than five, you’ll already be done with all that The Living Daylights has to offer. This is a boring little game that should have been reformatted instead of released.