From Russia With Love

7.1
Good

Gameplay	7.5	"From Russia With Love is a welcome throwback to classic Bond."
Graphics	7.0
Sound	8.0
Value	7.0

By Shaun Hunter

The name’s Bond, James Bond.

From Russia With Love puts players into the shoes of 007 in the videogame adaptation of the 1963 film of the same name. And yes, the original Bond, Sean Connery, comes back 22 years later to do the voice acting.

As soon as you load the first level, you’re thrown into combat action, which is the way that a 007 game should begin. Although there is a training stage a couple of levels into the game, it is the first level in which you will be learning the ropes and finding out what each button does. It only takes a few minutes to get a handle on the controls, helped by the limited shoulder buttons on the PSP.

One of the game’s major features is what’s known as ‘Bond Focus’. Basically, while targeting the enemy with the L button, you can hit square to zoom in and move the targeting dot for pinpoint precision to help with gaining a higher score at the end of each level. As you’ll soon realise, this feature comes in handy as simply blasting into enemies instead of choosing your shots wisely will result in your weapon of choice quickly running out of ammo. While the Bond Focus concept is not a new feature in action games, it provides some fresh combat gameplay.

From Russia With Love features a lot of video clips in between the gameplay, which is what you would expect from a movie-based videogame. Without them, the game would feel a bit shallow, and too much like a generic action game. However, it is these cutscenes that provide much of the game’s disappointment. Everything is slightly blurred, and the backgrounds feature a lot of ‘clumping’ of colours, resulting in a poor quality video. The only saving grace is Sean Connery’s voice as he fills the role of James Bond.

The only other main problem you may encounter is the camera angle. You’ll become increasing frustrated as the camera doesn’t do what you want, and the only manual option being to hold circle as it rotates around. Unfortunately, the camera will only rotate around one way, so if you’re wanting to look a few degrees counter-clockwise, you’ll have to wait for the camera to make its long way around clockwise.

With that said, the game is still fun to play. Once you look past the fact that the game has some minor flaws, you can thoroughly enjoy putting on your best tuxedo and blasting some adversaries as the original 007.

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