007: Quantum of Solace

Life is all about lessons and I learned a very important one before playing this game. Never let your girlfriend/wife pick your next game. Mine are listed alphabetically so she just picked the first one on the shelf. I suppose it was a good thing in a way because I wouldn’t have played it for another 5 years otherwise.

 A little history of my involvement with this game; I bought when I was still drunk after an all-nighter at University probably at some point during early 2009. It came with an Xbox360 custom front plate (which I never used) and I also bought nine other games. Bad times.

Anyway, after spending in excess of thirty quid on it, it became an ornament until the later part of 2013 when the conversation in the first paragraph happened and I broke the plastic seal and started playing.

Normally I wouldn’t offer much comment on the storyline of a movie based game as standard practice assumes that you essentially play out the movie. However, I didn’t think there was enough action in Quantum of Solace to warrant a video game and Activision agreed with me. Halfway through the game, we switch movies back to Casino Royale and play out the entirety of that one as well, before returning to the Quantum of Solace theme for the final mission. So it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.

Music wise, it hits all the right notes and I have to say, this is normally the best part of movie based games. It doesn’t give out high hopes for the rest of the game if the sound is the best part though as, in my opinion, it’s the least important factor in the complete game experience. Visually, it’s okay. It didn’t make my jaw drop or irritate me in any special way.

Gameplay wise, it is just another shooter where you have to navigate through a series of conveniently placed chest high walls, making it a cross between Gears of War and Call of Duty in what it offers. To me, it offered very little in terms of enjoyment and I doubt it would offer anything to fans of the first person shooter. Because of my huge balls (and unwillingness to do two playthroughs of game unless it can’t be avoided) I went straight in on the hardest difficulty level and didn’t encounter too many hold ups. I’m pretty shit at shooters, so this makes it an unchallenging unoriginal game.

The biggest issue I had with it was the quick-time events which are surprisingly affected by difficultly. On the highest difficulty level you have somewhere around about half a second to act. This didn’t effect the overall difficulty of the game as if you fail, you start back at the beginning of the quick-time event. It is just fucking annoying to have to repeat something three times because I don’t have the reactions of a fly (which, incidentally, is a really annoying insect.)

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The single player was hassle-free bar the quick-time events. There are a couple of level specific achievements but nothing too taxing and nothing secret! The collectible achievements are also stress free with only four or five collectible per level and a clean up only takes a few hours max after an initial playthrough on the hardest difficulty. However, the 1,000 points was not completely straightforward because...

Multiplayer

... of the horrendous ball-ache, pile of shit, pointlessly bollocks multiplayer achievements. The first time I reviewed a game with these achievements, I pointed out that they are horrible additions to most games for two reasons, one of them being that they only have a limited time where people will play online before moving on to other things. There was no one playing this game when I tried to start legitimately earning these achievements which means I was left to try boosting for them with others. I have to extend my thanks to the multiple people I played with to clear this and some of the conversations we had made it less of a pain in the ass but there were a few aspects to this which made the whole episode far more painful than it could have been.

Firstly, another reason that I don’t like playing online is that there appears to be no restrictions on the types of people who are allowed to interact with others. There was one guy who came into our group chat to say ‘I am retarded’ over and over again. It’s not true though. He wasn’t retarded. He was a fucking moron.

Secondly, the multiplayer doesn’t allow for you to be put restrictions on your matches. We couldn’t stop random players joining our games if we didn’t have eight players. I don’t understand a game with online capacity that doesn’t give you the option of putting these kinds of restrictions in place. It meant that we were unfortunately subject to more of the garbage mentioned above.

Thirdly, the one achievement that has us all playing for ages was ‘For England, James?’ which requires the players to get 100,000 credits. We were playing Golden Gun Mode where each player can score 970 credits per game. Each game is 7 minutes long. This means that, playing in this way, without any allowance for 12 year old dickheads mentioned above, it takes no less than 12 hours to get this achievement and that’s using a boosting method.

To put this into perspective, there are other achievements for buying all of the weapons for online play and the total cost for this is less than 100,000 credits... what is the point is playing once you unlocked everything there is to unlock? I suppose this is reserved for the people that actually enjoy the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

In summary, the single player was short and sweet and the multiplayer was arduous and shit. I did make some friends though so it wasn’t a tragic loss although I am amazed how easily people can come together in common hatred for something...oh wait, hang on...