After GoldenEye and the Game Boy games, the Bond license moved from Nintendo to Electronic Arts, with their first game based on the film Tomorrow Never Dies and developed by Black Ops Entertainment.
While with GoldenEye, I recreated something close to the original experience, I want to give the other games the best chance possible, so I played games in emulators with improved resolution, widescreen and adjusting the controls to be more comfortable.
Tomorrow Never Dies is a third person shooter with a focus on auto aim (although the auto aim is deliberately inaccurate). You can manually aim, but it’s very slow. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t take advantage of the DualShock controller, instead oping to focus entirely on the original controller. While it’s understandable they didn’t want to prevent anyone from playing, it’s a shame that they didn’t support additional options. The original control scheme uses X to shoot and the shoulder buttons to strafe, but I managed to make a more comfortable control scheme more like a standard third person shooter, just without the ability to look up and down.
The first level has you fight through a snow base and target a communications tower by targeting it with a special camera (the best gadget use in the game), then escape by skiing down the mountain. The skiing is awkward but not terrible, although both Bond’s and the enemies attacks of flailing their arms looks absolutely pitiful.
The health bar was an issue for me, I’m colourblind and could not make out any visual differences as I took damage. The life system is also a bit strange: you have limited lives and when you die, you just flash and carry on from exactly where you were. Each mission has one extra life hidden in it.
After this first mission, you have a mission where you take pictures of some machinery and steal a jet (which I got in an it span around oddly until the mission ended). The missions in this game are fairly short and there are only 10 in the game. After the end of this mission, it cuts to a clip of the film, followed by the full opening credits, featuring the song from the film. I always found that the movie clips makes the game feel more disjointed, especially as everyone’s voices sounds different due to different voice actors.
The next two missions are also fairly simple: obtaining information form Carver’s Media building and newspaper press. Gadgets are pretty much keycards, and you just shoot your way through the levels, even though the mission briefing implies stealth, other than manually aiming and shooting before the enemy is fully rendered, there is none.
The next level is about rescuing and protecting Carver’s wife, here you are introduced to the game’s boss fights (they all work like this). You have to dodge their main attacks while either using an immense amount of ammo, or risk manually aiming for a headshot to take off a decent amount. It’s not an enjoyable way to do boss fights at all, and they’re all the same except for different projectiles.
Next up is the game’s best mission: a car chase where you have to blow up an enemy convoy. It’s very basic, and like many other missions, is incredibly short, but it manages to not be frustrating and the handling is passable enough to have a bit of fun.
This is followed immediately by another skiing mission that ends in a boss fight, before you infiltrate Carver’s headquarters, get captured and escape with Wai Lin – who has not been seen or mentioned at all in this game until she randomly appears when Bond gets captured. Without knowing the plot of the film quite well, you would be lost playing the game.
While she randomly turned up at the end of the previous mission without being seen or mentioned previously, you now get to play as Wei Lin for a mission. M explains that she can’t send Bond as the guards have been ordered to shoot him on sight, so while playing as Wei, you turn around a corner and immediately get shot at by guards, so having Bond sent would have made no difference.
She gets to fight a boss to get a rocket launcher and then use that to fight a helicopter, before having to decode information (done via a simple Mastermind-style minigame). This is the most action-spy level of the game, and Bond isn’t even part of it.
Now you’re onto the final level, which has a confusing layout and lots of corridors that look exactly the same. You have to stop Carver from launching a nuke, and he is as strong as all the other bosses in the game. After you defeat him, you have to quickly cancel the nuclear launch then escape the boat.
If you’re not playing on the hardest difficulty you’ll then get a message: finish on 00 Agent mode to get unlock the final cutscene. This is the only unlockable of the game, and if you trudge through the hardest difficulty, you’ll unlock this final cutscene: a two second long clip from the film of the boat exploding, followed by random clips of previous missions. It’s such a hilariously bad reward.
There’s no fun unlockables, no difference other than enemy health and damage between difficulties and no multiplayer. It’s a very short, bare bones games and isn’t even a fun one.
While with GoldenEye, I recreated something close to the original experience, I want to give the other games the best chance possible, so I played games in emulators with improved resolution, widescreen and adjusting the controls to be more comfortable.
Tomorrow Never Dies is a third person shooter with a focus on auto aim (although the auto aim is deliberately inaccurate). You can manually aim, but it’s very slow. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t take advantage of the DualShock controller, instead oping to focus entirely on the original controller. While it’s understandable they didn’t want to prevent anyone from playing, it’s a shame that they didn’t support additional options. The original control scheme uses X to shoot and the shoulder buttons to strafe, but I managed to make a more comfortable control scheme more like a standard third person shooter, just without the ability to look up and down.
The first level has you fight through a snow base and target a communications tower by targeting it with a special camera (the best gadget use in the game), then escape by skiing down the mountain. The skiing is awkward but not terrible, although both Bond’s and the enemies attacks of flailing their arms looks absolutely pitiful.
The health bar was an issue for me, I’m colourblind and could not make out any visual differences as I took damage. The life system is also a bit strange: you have limited lives and when you die, you just flash and carry on from exactly where you were. Each mission has one extra life hidden in it.
After this first mission, you have a mission where you take pictures of some machinery and steal a jet (which I got in an it span around oddly until the mission ended). The missions in this game are fairly short and there are only 10 in the game. After the end of this mission, it cuts to a clip of the film, followed by the full opening credits, featuring the song from the film. I always found that the movie clips makes the game feel more disjointed, especially as everyone’s voices sounds different due to different voice actors.
The next two missions are also fairly simple: obtaining information form Carver’s Media building and newspaper press. Gadgets are pretty much keycards, and you just shoot your way through the levels, even though the mission briefing implies stealth, other than manually aiming and shooting before the enemy is fully rendered, there is none.
The next level is about rescuing and protecting Carver’s wife, here you are introduced to the game’s boss fights (they all work like this). You have to dodge their main attacks while either using an immense amount of ammo, or risk manually aiming for a headshot to take off a decent amount. It’s not an enjoyable way to do boss fights at all, and they’re all the same except for different projectiles.
Next up is the game’s best mission: a car chase where you have to blow up an enemy convoy. It’s very basic, and like many other missions, is incredibly short, but it manages to not be frustrating and the handling is passable enough to have a bit of fun.
This is followed immediately by another skiing mission that ends in a boss fight, before you infiltrate Carver’s headquarters, get captured and escape with Wai Lin – who has not been seen or mentioned at all in this game until she randomly appears when Bond gets captured. Without knowing the plot of the film quite well, you would be lost playing the game.
While she randomly turned up at the end of the previous mission without being seen or mentioned previously, you now get to play as Wei Lin for a mission. M explains that she can’t send Bond as the guards have been ordered to shoot him on sight, so while playing as Wei, you turn around a corner and immediately get shot at by guards, so having Bond sent would have made no difference.
She gets to fight a boss to get a rocket launcher and then use that to fight a helicopter, before having to decode information (done via a simple Mastermind-style minigame). This is the most action-spy level of the game, and Bond isn’t even part of it.
Now you’re onto the final level, which has a confusing layout and lots of corridors that look exactly the same. You have to stop Carver from launching a nuke, and he is as strong as all the other bosses in the game. After you defeat him, you have to quickly cancel the nuclear launch then escape the boat.
If you’re not playing on the hardest difficulty you’ll then get a message: finish on 00 Agent mode to get unlock the final cutscene. This is the only unlockable of the game, and if you trudge through the hardest difficulty, you’ll unlock this final cutscene: a two second long clip from the film of the boat exploding, followed by random clips of previous missions. It’s such a hilariously bad reward.
There’s no fun unlockables, no difference other than enemy health and damage between difficulties and no multiplayer. It’s a very short, bare bones games and isn’t even a fun one.