High Octane Bond
Blood Stone is a cover based third person action game with a few vehicle chase sequences. You’ll encounter several hundred enemies and visit a half dozen or so different areas of the world. The single player mode flies by in about six hours as you steadily work your way through levels with a difficulty level that never changes from the first moments of the game to the last.
Controls are simple enough, especially given that much of the experience is button-prompt based, meaning Bond isn’t able to carry out an action until a prompt appears. This does make the adventure seem largely on rails and out of your hands, but it does help the game feel very Hollywood and cinematic (similar to Uncharted but not as satisfying). Controls include X for takedowns, Y to switch between your pistol and secondary weapon, B to interact with the environment (push a button, kick a door, vault over an object, etc), and RB to pick up weapons and reload. Anytime you do a takedown or a stealth takedown, Bond earns a Focus Aim, which you can hold up to three. Focus Aims, are activated (awkwardly, I thought) by pressing LB+RT. A Focus Aim allows Bond a few seconds in slow motion to make accurate kill shots against multiple enemies.
At times, Bond will face up to a half dozen enemies at once, all toting weapons. The AI’s approach is definitely quantity instead of quality as you’ll pick them off with ease. The most satisfying kills are with the takedowns which Bond can do to any enemy as long as he’s close enough. By pressing X when the prompt appears, Bond performs one of several cool looking hand to hand takedowns. Most of your kills are from a longer range though and require that you used any of a variety of weapons that include a
silence pistol, shotgun, MP5, AK74, grenade launcher, M24 sniper rifle, and several others. I think there are sixteen different weapons in game. In the campaign, you can’t upgrade weapons or anything like that, so most of them do feel and behave very similarly.
To help you locate the enemies, and your objective, Bond has a smartphone he uses to get intel from MI:6 no matter what part of the world he’s in (or how far below ground). By pressing down on the d-pad, Bond will hold out his phone. The screen turns a sort of night vision green, and certain items are highlighted. These items include the path you need to take, where enemies in the area are, and what weapons are lying around that you can pick up. Getting lost isn’t a big concern in Blood Stone as the levels are very linear in design with only one possible route to take. Being able to spot enemies is cool though, and that helps you not only stay alive but also plan your approach. Being able to locate weapons in the area proved helpful a time or two as well, although even when you don’t use the phone to spot them, they appear a sort of gold-color that usually isn’t hard to spot anyway. Oh, the phone can also be used to scan information in the game world, and these bits of info (there are fifty of them) act as the game’s ‘collectible’ that most releases in this genre have these days.
Continued
In some regard, the story is one large chase sequence that sees Bond traveling the globe to back track the source of evil. Most levels start off calmly with lots of NPCs in the area and your weapon holstered. Despite NPCs in the area, you cannot interact with them and they do not speak, so they don’t add much atmosphere at all. These moments of calm are understandably brief as some event will trigger the firefight or chase sequence that dominates the remainder of the level. Often, a level will include a driving sequence, usually at the end. These sequences are pretty cool and feature some frantic driving as Bond tries to chase down one bad guy or another in a sports car, boat, and even in a tow truck (chasing a massive rock truck) in Bangkok. You can fail these driving sequences by falling too far behind or falling into the sea as can happen in a couple of instances, including Siberia. My only gripe with these driving parts is the sudden failure that can happen; these moments are supposed to be adrenaline pumping and satisfying, but when you’re exciting drive comes to an immediate stop, the effect of the moment gets less and less interesting. I will give credit to Bizarre though as Blood Stone utilizes checkpoints very well throughout the game and load times are very brief.
As for the presentation, Blood Stone is just okay. I wasn’t wowed by any of the visuals or the sounds, although the game does feature the likeness and voice of Daniel Craig and Judi Dench (as M). In game visuals are decent, with the greatest detractor being the repetitive appearances of the numerous enemies you’ll see. Each level basically has a handful of enemies, with every ‘shotgun guy’ looking just like the next ‘shotgun guy’ if you know what I mean. On the other hand, framerate (especially during
the driving parts) and animations are for the most part nicely done. The cutscenes could have used more polish though as lips and audio don’t match up very well and the detail in the cutscenes isn’t great.
Blood Stone does also feature a multiplayer component with Team Deathmatch, Last Man Standing, Objective-based modes available over System Link or Xbox Live. Players earn XP towards various ranking and costume unlocks, but little else. In limited testing, my experience with multiplayer was so-so, but frankly not enough to keep me wanting to come back for more.
With that, let’s get to the summary…