EA's 007 Racing gives gamers the chance to play as British agent James Bond, and more specifically to drive his cars. Players get to handle Bond's many stealthy, gadget-laden cars, shooting enemies down with bullets and missiles, utilizing smoke screens, oil slicks, and the like to knock them out of commission, and foisting his enemies as best as the stiff-@ss Brits know how. There are hints of Spy Hunter and even Twisted Metal, but nothing here ever bests those games. Perhaps if the game looked -- and played -- like a fifth-generation PlayStation game, instead of a first-generation game, it would be more likeable. But that's not the case.
Gameplay
EA's 007 Racing is probably one of the best game ideas ever. It's also one of the best ideas for a game that's been horrendously hacked to mincemeat. Everyone I know wants to drive a bitchin', expensive, highly modified weapon-of-a-car. It's a fundamental need, like eating, sleeping, and having sex. Well...it comes right after those, anyway. But the game provides immediate satisfaction (and an extra amount of dissatisfaction) because players jump right into several of Bond's cars -- Aston Martin DB 5, BMW Z3 Roadster, and a handful of others.
Taking a nod from the massive library of 19 Bond films, MI6's "Q Branch" dishes up a good assortment of weaponry and gadgets. The laundry list include machineguns, surface-to-air missiles, spike and mine dispensers, rocket launchers, smoke screens, an oil slick generator, tire shredders and bulletproof windows. Cars take physical -- visual -- damage, and they are based on a four-point model, which means that there are four collision points on the car, enabling it to take to the air better, spin, twist, flip, etc. The missions take place in locales such as Eastern Europe, Amsterdam, South America, Mexico, Monte Carlo, Louisiana, and New York.
What 007 Racing boils down to is simple arcade racing action. You get the chance to thwart enemies by altering their plans to destroy the world, via a number of objective-based missions. You get your objectives, and you must meet them to beat the level, which is based on a scoring system. To be fair, 007 Racing has a wide variety of mission levels. One of the best levels in the game is "Escape," which is a straight-out racing level in which you have to beat out Koskov's hot-looking assassin through the jungles of Mexico. You need speed and a decent knowledge of the course to beat it, and of course it's highly reminiscent of Spy Hunter. I personally would have been happy to see a lot more levels like this, but it wasn't in the cards.
One of the levels that should have been a great level, because of all of the objectives, is Air Strike. Do you know how many times I played that frickin' level before I actually understood what to do? Call me a dumb-@ss if you will (and I there are those of you who exist), but detonating those mines isn't what I call intuitive. Also, what's up with losing a little bit if health each time blow up a mine and that hightail it out of there? Even when I perfectly dropped set the bomb off, and then left on time, I still lost health. And then I lose health by breaking up tents and then gain the same amount back? Ughhh! Levels like this and Ambush are potentially great levels, but they're badly balanced and clumsily constructed. Highway Hazard was kind of cool, too -- you get the chance to pierce each of the tires of an 18-wheeler with a high-tech laser, and once you've done it you win. It reminds me of Speed Racer and Spy Hunter, and yet it's not as fun to play or watch.
Yeah, the level design isn't only unbalanced, it's awkward. While it seems like a good idea to have a minimum score to beat a level in the final analysis, to beat some of these levels and then miss the minimum score was an exercise in frustration.
Strangely enough, while I have qualms with the level design and the game's overall imbalance, the actual driving isn't bad. The engine sounds and looks of each car were pretty spot-on. The brakes and acceleration are solid, and the e-brake makes for some killer power-slides. Using the e-brake is a lot of fun. And despite an eye-piercingly painful framerate, the sense of speed wasn't too bad in some situations. It's almost impossible to have a bad framerate and a good sense of speed, but at least in the Escape level, the speed level was high. Strange, that.
Graphics
After five years of the PlayStation growing and growing as a system and developers pushing its limits, it's remarkable that any company could create a horrible set of graphics such as these. I mean, this game wouldn't make a top 500 best-looking games list. Everything is haywire here: pop-up, really mind-inducing perspective correction problems, terrible (terrible!) collision detection, and murky, grainy, low resolution visuals. Seams pop-up everywhere and the particle system -- if you want to call it that -- is straight from the 16-bit years. Ouch.
The characters are small and indistinct, and the collision detection is total rubbish. I mean, sure, if I wasn't supposed to hit a scientist that's fine. But when I shoot them the bullets go right through. If I run them down, they turn invisible. That's just one of many examples.
Still, if this game were simply a great one based solely on straightforward gameplay, I would say so. But it's not. Neither the graphics nor the gameplay are that exceptional and most kids who have any sense about them will look at this game and wonder what year this was made. ("This was made in 2000? No way!")
Sound
The weird thing about the sound is that parts of sound are good, and some of them are simply really hard to hear. I had to turn the sound almost entirely off to hear the characters speaking during several levels. There appears to have been some interesting things going on in the production of this game, and it didn't sounding like Gerswin. Thankfully, Eutechnyx edited out a lot of the stock 007 sounds that hammered gamers ears in the alpha version of this game. The repetitive da-daaaa-duuhhh! clips are still too numerous. Q and his helper, done by John Cleese are perfect. But Bond is as weak as he was in The World Is Not Enough. M sounds good, though, and numerous other voice actors do a decent job.
