Pierce Brosnan’s last ride as James Bond was a video game?!
What Is It? 007 Everything or Nothing is a 2004 third person action game released on a few systems by EA. The game features an original Bond storyline with voice and likenesses from Pierce Brosnan, Willem Dafoe, Hedi Klum, Shannon Elizabeth, John Cleese, Judy Dench, and Richard Kiel as Jaws.
Dafoe’s evil Nikolai Diavolo has a plan to take over the world through the use of nanobots and there is only one man who can stop him. Klum and Elizabeth play the roles of sidekick and femme fatale while Cleese and Dench, alongside Mya of all people, are your home base team. You can safely ignore the story elements here, or lean into them for a good, campy James Bond time.
The game is a third person shooter spread across nearly 30 levels, most of which can be completed in about five minutes or less. The game has light cover aspects where you can duck or attach to a wall while standing. You can autolock onto enemies and then refine the exact aimpoint within the autolock, this will allow you to pinpoint enemies for headshots while mostly staying covered. Bond gets his trademark pistol in most missions with the ability to pick up a variety of guns from downed enemies. Machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, sniper rifles, etc… Pretty much everything you’d expect from Bond and the genre.
Waves of enemies will come at Bond and they typically pack a strong punch. I was quite surprised at how many attempts it took me to get through the first real level. You need to use cover often and, particularly in later levels, learn where the body armor healing items are so you can heal up after tough sections.
It isn’t just tearing through enemies, of course, James Bond always has more tricks up his sleeve. Within the standard third person action sections, you will find yourself using gadgets such as a remote controlled robot to open doors or surprise enemies and a rappel gun which includes an extremely cool “auto-deploys when you jump off the side of a building” feature to keep the action moving.
Aside from that, the game features quite a few levels, or sections of levels, which have you driving. Anytime from classic Bond cars to a motorcycle with an incredibly slick “lean down on your side to get under barriers” trick. The cars handle well enough, even if your first few tries might take some trial-and-error. Gran Turismo, this is not.
The whole game can be beaten in around ten hours. Each level has different point and time goals to hit to achieve a platinum rating, adding a fair amount of replayability for those who really want to dive into the Bond experience
The Best Part: The game feels like a James Bond movie. It certainly leans heavier into “Bond running around shooting dozens of bad guys” more than the typical movie would, but you are never far off from a car chase, rappelling straight off the edge of a building, jumping off of a cliff without a parachute, or dozens of other Bond-like moments. This is tied together with a typically lightweight story and carried through a star-studded cast.
The Worst Part: Almost every part of the gameplay is agonizingly close to being really good, but they almost all fall just short. There is, for example, a fun part where you ride a motorcycle through a series of stairs and rooftops in a picturesque French city on the water. This is, by any metric, an extremely James Bond thing to do and a fantastic idea for a fun bit of gameplay. While remaining fun, it also kind of falls apart because you are rarely able to actually gain enough speed to make the jumps. The developers knew this, so the game will magically suck your motorcycle onto the place it is supposed to land which makes this entire sequence a very basic “hold X and maybe steer a bit” experience. What could have been a thrilling bit of gameplay with do-or-die motorcycle jumps, turns into something significantly less than that. This feeling is repeated throughout many portions of the game. Almost all of them are fun, but very few rise above that.
The Verdict: Movie tie-in games are almost as old as videogames themselves. It makes sense to let people play through the stories they are watching in movies. The concept of creating original stories starring the cast of movies is a phenomenon relegated to a very tiny window in videogame history. It’s a weird bit of history, featuring the likes of this, Ghostbusters, and maybe a few others. The fun part about Everything or Nothing is that it very much succeeds in what it is trying to do.
Imagine a James Bond movie which is 20+ high-action setpieces, one after another, with only a few minutes of breaks in between (those would be the trips to HQ to talk to Q and M). There are practical reasons movies can’t be paced like this and are, instead, built around a few big set piece action scenes with expositional content bridging them. Who needs that mess in a videogame? Everything or Nothing throws you into the action and doesn’t let up over the 10 or so hour playtime.
It gets a lot of the gameplay right, while never truly mastering any single piece. Gunplay and melee combat are both totally functional, with a reasonable cover system helping. Stealth sections are somewhat rare, but they also play just fine. Ditto the various driving sequences as well as the gadgets digital Bond deploys throughout the game.
At the end of the day, I find 007 Everything or Nothing a fascinating time capsule of a game. One that couldn’t get made today for various reasons. The gameplay is completely sound but not spectacular which makes this very fun game definitely more than the sum of its parts. This is easily one of the best James Bond videogames out there, and remains a good time over 20 years later.
How to Play: PlayStation 2*, Xbox, GameCube
*console played on for this review
Leave a Reply