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Blood Stone Review Microsoft Xbox360

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  • Blood Stone Review Microsoft Xbox360

    Bizarre have produced some terrific games this generation with The Club proving they are capable of turning out a very polished third-person shooter and pretty much everything else showing they know how to make quality racing games. So you’d think that, having been granted the reigns to the 007 license, their latest release, mixing as it does both genres, would prove to be an unequivocal success. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, the game derailed and became a poorly paced, repetitive bore, albeit one with a couple of blinding car chases and a reasonably competent multiplayer offering thrown in.

    Blood Stone screenshot.
    Due to financing issues placing the movie follow up to Quantum of Solace on hold, a lot of effort has been put into making this game as authentic a replacement as possible, with an original script penned by Bruce Feirstein and all the key actors from the films turning in accomplished performances for their roles. Despite this, however, the finished plot feels like an uninspired re-hash of many of the themes already covered in the two Daniel Craig films to date, focusing on the collateral fallout of Bond’s actions and the threat of some unknown, secretive organisation that are bigger than anything MI6 have encountered before. Apparently Britain’s secret service find it difficult to ensure any kind of staff loyalty these days as yet again they appear to have been infiltrated – maybe they need a bonus scheme or dress down Friday or something.
    Blood Stone screenshot.
    The storyline manages to feel repetitive over its short duration: chase down a generic underworld contact, ascertain their employer, watch them die, rinse and repeat. And as for casting Joss Stone, a singer not widely known for her acting ability, as the next Bond girl, well, the decision was a bizarre one. In all fairness her character is portrayed as a somewhat vapid ‘it’ girl so perhaps her teeth grindingly annoying performance was her really getting into the role, rather than demonstrating a complete and utter inability to act on her part. The whole storyline feels dialled in, it’s tired and uninvolving and doesn’t reach any strong conclusion before its half-hearted cliff-hanger ending.

    Blood Stone screenshot.
    Despite the mediocre scripting, the game is spread out across a number of fantastic-looking locations, including Bangkok, with its towering skyline; Siberia, featuring an impressive section in which the player speeds along a river on hovercraft – the detailed scenery whizzing past at an incredible pace; and Istanbul, sporting a heart-racing sequence where Bond is chased down a vast tunnel by a giant, grinding drill. The water effects all look great and are complemented by some nice lighting layouts, particularly in the Siberian power plant where the developers have created a number of very accomplished interior and architectural designs. Everything down to the way 007’s jacket subtlety moves in time with his breathing demonstrates a high degree of attention to detail and technical accomplishment.
    Blood Stone screenshot.
    But whilst it may be a real looker, with some impressive draw distances to boot, the flow and balance of the game is dry and derivative. The third-person shooter segments mix cover-based gameplay with basic mêlée takedowns, each of which unlock an instant-kill focus-shot very similar to those found in the Bourne Conspiracy from several years ago. The implementation of these elements is solid enough but the game’s designers have produced a very rigid, repetitive experience. Rather than challenging the player by forcing them to adapt to the enemy AI or cover layouts, they’ve instead opted for just repeatedly spawning waves of weak enemies from the same locations over and over again. You don’t have to move around and there’s never any degree of pressure – it’s just aim and dispatch, aim and dispatch, with no variety and barely any challenge. Many level sections overstay their welcome with just too many of the same waves crammed into their space, to such an extent that many players will go into auto-pilot and switch off. These setups feel like crudely implemented padding, aimed purely at extending the length of what is already a somewhat short experience, and the result is a stagnant pacing that leads to far too many dull moments.
    Blood Stone screenshot.

    It wouldn’t be a Bond game without stealth sections, having become a hallmark for the series, but Blood Stone’s handling of them is half-hearted at best. There’s no actual crouch button so the only way for the player to duck out of sight is to latch onto cover. Unfortunately this really hampers the kind of level layouts and enemy patterns that the designers could produce while still making it possible for 007 to move around undetected. This means that the player does not face a whole lot of variety or complexity in the enemy patrols, the majority will just stand there with their backs to the camera, requiring little effort to dispatch. Even if you are detected and the guards call it in on the radio it’s rare for more enemies to actually show up anyway.
    Blood Stone screenshot.
    This kind of controlling, hand-holding behaviour is exhibited in other areas as well. All too often exciting sequences that would have had at least some degree of interactivity in Treyarch’s predecessor, the Quantum of Solace game, are now delivered in cut scenes. The on-foot chase sequences, whilst nicely laid out, are merely an exercise in tapping the odd button every once in a while to leap a gap. There’s no timing element to this or positional requirement, just walk vaguely near the edge, tap B and the game does everything for you. After all we wouldn’t want to let involving the player get in the way of all those nice cinematic camera angles now would we?
    Blood Stone screenshot.

    The driving sections thankfully are far more polished affairs. At several junctures during the game you can take control of a variety of vehicles including a speedboat and the mandatory Aston Martin. These sections are fast paced and exciting, excellently capturing the feel of the movies, with one early car chase very reminiscent of the Quantum film’s opener. Whilst one section featuring a tuk-tuk fails to match the same quality level as the others, with the course repeating the exact same sequence several times over, it is easily made up for by an absolutely blistering race in Siberia. This sees the player flying across the packed ice in an Aston DBS, dodging the freezing waters and the fire from a circling helicopter before leaping off a jump and landing on the target’s departing train – it's everything you could hope for from a Bond chase sequence. Blood Stone’s vehicles really are the highlight of the show, throwing a wide variety of obstacles at the player and adding some much needed diversity to the game.

    Unfortunately, the multiplayer component is very much a mixed bag, it has some great basic ideas but is hampered by a lack of level diversity and some odd balancing decisions. One of the novel features is the way that kills are graded at varying levels of difficulty. For example, if you shoot a stationary opponent you’ll gain ten experience points, whereas if you shoot them while they are running then you’ll also get the tracker award for the kill which will net you a total of twenty. This grading system rewards the more able players and makes skilful kills that much more satisfying. Another neat idea is the way in which the top player on each team is rewarded with a special leader skin (in the case of the MI6 team you actually get to play as Bond himself). It doesn’t always work flawlessly and can get stuck on the wrong player but is a great way to encourage internal competition within the team.


    As good as these elements are, they just can’t make up for a few poorly thought-out details that spoil what could have been an otherwise great multiplayer offering. The main crime is the fact that a mêlée attack will instantly kill the enemy regardless of whether you strike from the front or back. Couple this with the slow turning arc inherent to any third person shooter, due to the camera’s distance from the actual pivot point, and you get the scenario where it is possible to run up to a person from the front and mêlée them to death before they can kill you with gun fire. Due to the small nature of many maps, coupled with plenty of blind corners that a canny player can hide behind and still see around by adjusting their camera, this becomes a cheap and easy way to rack up the kills.

    Further to this there are only six maps for the deathmatch and two for the objective modes. The designs are reasonable but all too often the maps just boil down to two or three main routes between the spawns with one choke point along each. There’s not a whole lot of depth to uncover and as a result, each game turns into the same old routine of retaining control of just a small handful of points on the map. While it makes a good first impression there really isn't anything here to keep the player coming back for more in the long-term.


    Blood Stone is a hard game to recommend – it’s short, shallow and superficial. The game is riddled with poor design choices and is a big step backwards from the previous Quantum of Solace title. It ultimately marks a return to the kind of generic tie-in experience that players came to expect from movie-licensed titles years ago, and doesn’t bring anything original or compelling to the table to make up for its unambitious gameplay. A few, admittedly exciting, vehicle sections are not enough to save the game from mediocrity and the mulitplayer lacks sufficient staying power to make up for the weak single-player campaign.


    Players: 1-16
    Genre: Third person shooter
    Developer: Bizarre Creations
    Publisher: Activision
    Platform: Xbox 360
    Version: European
    Pros:
    -Vehicle sections very strong.
    -Multiplayer scoring nicely handled.
    -Graphics top notch.
    Cons:
    -Repetitive.
    -Crippled stealth mechanics.
    -Shallow multiplayer.

    Score: 5/10
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