007 Blood Stone (PS3)

Happy New Year everyone! For the first time ever I was intentionally given New Years day off as a holiday from work which is really nice. Being that I am really ahead on other creative projects I decided to use this time to knock some games out of the backlog and complete some shorter titles and go ahead and get them finished. It's very nice to just have a day to simply relax, do nothing and play games when you feel like your time off is very finite and you spend a lot of time being very hard on yourself about productivity on your days off. Michelle and I uploaded our year end video on the channel recently and got some very nice feedback from our friends and viewers who watched it. It was a lot of fun to discuss with friends and celebrate our experiences and the media that resonated with us in 2023. Recapping my list of completed games from 2023 I realized that there were only 4 titles that were newly completed out of the backlog, Halo Infinite, Samurai Warriors, Yomawari: Lost in the Dark and Odin Sphere. I really wanted to do text review for Yomawari and Odin Sphere and frankly, I should have. But I was just kind of captivated in my own thoughts with them and had played them gradually over a very long period of time. I will play them again with friends and probably write about them then. 

One of my best friends had a really fun idea to create a video game advent calendar leading up to Christmas where we would randomly pick games from our collections to play one a day from 12/01-12/24. Some of the games I played during that time I have decided to go ahead and play to completion just to knock them out and get them finished. The one I finished today on 1/01/24 is 007 Blood Stone for the PS3. Lots of people are probably very nostalgic about Goldeneye 007 on the N64 and while that was my first ever first person game, I am personally more nostalgic for 007 Nightfire and Everything or Nothing on the PS2 and Xbox as my brother and I put a lot of hours into both games as kids. Blood Stone was the only standalone 3rd person game released in the Daniel Craig era not based on a movie in any way and I remember it getting average reviews when it first came out. It released in 2010 but I didn't pick up a copy until probably 2014 or so after I had picked up my own PS3 and was quickly acquiring a library of games for it. What did I think of it? It was flawed but enjoyable. It's better than Goldeneye Reloaded or 007 Legends but not as good as Everything or Nothing and Nightfire. The Daniel Craig era of James Bond films is often regarded as a tonal reset for the franchise, taking a step back from the cartoonishly over the top spectacle of the late Pierce Brosnan era where the series became almost a parody of itself. Here in Blood Stone, some moments are so over the top and often Bond performs certain actions as if he has super powers. That immediately gave the game a certain degree of silliness that I feel was unintended, but it's a consequence of juxtaposing Daniel Craig's Bond with the over the top video game logic. 

The basic gameplay, much like Nightfire and most of the other 007 games, alternates between Stealth, combat and driving. Rotating between the three. It's one of the only bond games to have regenerating health which does make it easier than some of the old ones where once you took damage it was permanent and there was no way to heal it off aside from picking up armor for a temporary shield. To offset the regenerating health, the time to kill for both you and your enemies is VERY quick. If you're not in cover, expect to die in very few shots although this is still pretty infrequent given how much cover there is available. The game uses the pick up and drop off two weapon system "which was the style at the time" (insert Simpsons meme here) but instead of being able to carry ANY two weapons, it's one two handed weapon like a rifle and your pistol. This accompanied by no off hand grenade throwing and a general lack of audio/visual feedback from the weapons made the combat feel "fine" at best. Nothing special about it at all but it gets the job done especially in some of the more intense battles in the last two missions. The cutscenes are pretty well done for the era with some decent animations and face models. The voice acting is also pretty top notch with Daniel Craig and Judy Dench reprising their roles from the films for the game. Unlike a lot of the older James Bond games, the fact that this game takes place in the era of smartphones means that most of the old "cool gadgets" have been reduced to simply a smartphone that does everything. In Nightfire for instance, you had a zippo lighter with a hidden camera in it, a grappling hook, a laser wristwatch and so many other cool gadgets and to reduce that to simply a smartphone that is just a glorified map with the ability to highlight targets and scan objectives just feels like a total waste of the potential that this setting provides for video games. 

I always enjoy how these games break up the pace with non combat sections where you have to blend into a public area to gather information. Nightfire had an extremely memorable level like this where you could walk around at a party and the NPCs would acknowledge you and interact with you. It was incredibly immersive. The one or two moments like that in this game do not have any NPCs engaging with you or talking to you in any way. Finally I wanted to talk about the driving sequences and while it was nice to have driving sequences again after Goldeneye Reloaded didn't have any, they don't compare at all to the driving sequences in Nightfire or Everything or Nothing. Mostly because they are all chase sequences where all you are doing is driving at a very high speed, there is no car combat or any other mechanics going on at the same time like in the other games. Also the margin for error with making a mistake is basically non existent with some of these chases. You hit any obstacle with some of these and it will take you so long to recover from your mistake that instantly it's game over. One of the later driving sequences I died about 5 or 6 times in the same spot because you can barely even see the road and determine what is a drivable surface and what isn't. There was one extremely memorable driving sequence however where you are driving a highjacked tow truck chasing after one of the industrial sized dump trucks. You even have another vehicle hooked up to the back of the tow truck at the start so you have to swing back and forth until you break it off and can drive faster with it removed. It was very different and extremely memorable.

So that's it for Blood Stone, I definitely enjoyed it but I would probably sooner recommend people go back and play the old ones I've mentioned rather than this one. I am looking forward to seeing what other kinds of games I can knock out of my backlog before I become preoccupied by other projects later in the year.