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Halo: Reach gets 10 new screenshots | Call of Duty: Black Ops Hardened and Prestige editions confirmed | Halo: Reach announcement revealed | Xbox 360 Slim 250GB hard drives to be sold separately | Ice-T: Hates Medal of Honor, loves Kane & Lynch 2 | Vanquish gets Casual Automatic and God Hard difficulties | Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock songlist thus far | Gears of War 3 'Save/Kill Carmine' shirts now available | OXM subscription is half-price! | Xbox 360 Slim and PS3 Slim do battle | Blacklight: Tango Down nationwide tournament kicks off next month | BioShock 2 gets patched up | Kinect no good for flight games says Ubisoft | Battlefield: Bad Company 2 gets two more maps | What has been the biggest Xbox Live Arcade seller this year? | Xbox Live Arcade overcame slow start this year | Madden NFL 11 Terrell Owens screens revealed | Microsoft defends Kinect price | Halo PC unlocks Halo: Reach item | Transformers: War for Cybertron DLC hits today | Kane & Lynch 2 gets three new trailers | Red Dead Redemption heading to Japan | THQ creating yet another WWE franchise | Lord of the Rings and Smackdown hits Games on Demand | DJ Hero 'increasing DJ equipment sales'

On the site today - News: Halo: Reach gets 10 new screenshots http://bit.ly/agUjBR

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Launch Player

Gears of War 2 ³⁶⁰

Vigilante 8: Arcade ^XLA

Review

Quantum of Solace

4.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer Treyarch

Publisher Activision

Genre Shoot 'em Up

5-Nov-2008 Were we left shaken and stirred? Yes, but not for the right reasons

23 Comments

What was your favourite bit in Casino Royale? Was it Bond's fist fight with the bald goon on top of a speeding train? Or was it the bit where Bond stealthily slinked after Vesper in Venice, to a soundtrack of exploding grenades and the death rattle of numerous machine guns?

If you can't recall those bits, it's because they're not actually in Casino Royale. We could fill the page with scenes that developer Treyarch has invented for the sake of creating a better game - the train siege, the nailgun boss fight, the shoot-out in the casino - but you're here to read about Quantum of Solace and not the Be Kind Rewind version of Casino Royale that Treyarch appears to have sat through.

Which brings us to our next point. If you're wondering why a Quantum of Solace review is referencing Casino Royale at all, well, ask Treyarch. At least two-thirds of this game plunder moments from Casino Royale and not the film shown on the box art.

Quantum of Solace happily jumps from its own scenes to Casino Royale and back without any kind of strand or line of thought connecting the two, as though Treyarch is literally designing each level as it remembers them.

As for the game itself, it's an astonishingly boring shoot-out from start to finish. A Bond world filled with brain-dead goons and endless machine-gun fire, scattered with gleaming gas canisters ready to explode at the slightest encouragement. The game doesn't really expect you to act like Bond, instead treating you like a magpie with a shotgun, happy to shoot at anything that shines and coo at the ensuing explosion.

Stealth is encouraged, but only because alarms set off infinite enemy respawns. Gadgets are used, but only to open doors. Daniel Craig is there, but only to look around slightly bored and confused when you take cover.

Quantum of Solace never manages to be a Bond game: at the tiniest of nudges, it panics and starts unleashing gunfire. It's clumsy, it's messy, it's not much fun and most of the time, it's not even the right film.

Ryan King