Publisher: EA Games, www.eagames.com
Age Appropriateness: ten and up.
Parental Advisory: Violent shooter game.
Violence
Rating: 
007 is the famous agent that never dies. And now Bond is back on the PlayStation
2 in EA's first rate James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire. In this latest shooter,
you, as Bond, have to save the world from a criminal mastermind who's trying
to bring the world to its knees.
Since the success of the amazing GoldenEye, the Bond license has been a hot franchise for games. And the games that followed GoldenEye, which included The World is Not Enough, have been good games. Agent Under Fire continues this tradition.
The game is mainly a first person action game that asks you to progress through twelve levels and complete the objectives that Q assigns to you. In addition to the first person action, you'll also drive cars. In execution, all of the familiar Bond elements are here-tricky gadgets: including a Q-Claw, Q-Jet, Q-Laser, and more; exotic sports cars, the Aston Martin DB5, BMW 750iL, and more; gorgeous females; and exotic locales that include Hong Kong, the Swiss Alps, and Romania.
As a first person shooter, Agent Under Fire is adequate. The opposing thugs, when compared to those in some games, are rather dumb, and don't pose as much of a challenge, unless they overwhelm you in sheer numbers.
Graphically, Agent Under Fire looks great. I was impressed with the character models and the game's environments that are quite attractive as well.
Agent Under Fire lets up to four compete in multi-player games and offers decent levels to play in. However, there aren't a lot of innovations, or even variations here. As multi-player games go, Agent Under Fire is mostly par for the course.
In the end, James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire delivers a solid experience. It's not quite up to the splash that GoldenEye once made in another time and place, but good enough to recommend. There may be better first-person shooters for the PlayStation 2, most notably Half-Life, but there is, after all, only one James Bond.
