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REVIEW

007-THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL

Mike Czech

In 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed, committing a broad group of companies to eliminating CFCs to prevent them from eating a hole in the Earth's ozone layer.

That's a strange topic for a game featuring the world-famous super-spy, James Bond. One would suspect that the game's publishers, Wendigo, just thought that "The Montreal Protocol" was a cool sounding name and green-lit the game before doing any research on how mundane the actual real-life Montreal Protocol would turn out to have been.

The studio, Ivy League Games, didn't get the memo, though, and appear to have taken the title entirely seriously. The game's villain, the refrigeration magnate "Earnest Blowhard", has devoted himself thoroughly and with unusual zealotry to maximizing the production of chlorofluorocarbons. He comes off as something of a Captain Planet villain, twirling his mustache and gleefully poisoning the environment with his air conditioners and beer coolers.

In this top-down action game, you control James Bond, the titular Agent 007 working for Her Majesty's Secret Service, in his efforts to bring down Earnest Blowhard's shady HVAC consortium, "S.W.E.L.T.E.R.".

I don't want to spoil the ending for you, but I will: after lifting himself out of a vat of room-temperature, non-toxic refrigerant, James Bond manages to get the ball rolling on a legal process that could result in Earnest Blowhard receiving a fairly significant fine.

The Gameplay

You might be used to top-down shoot-em-up games like Contra, where the point is to mow down as many faceless baddies as you can in a mad dash to the finish.

That is not the case here. 007 has a fairly limited set of tools, and he only gets refills for them at the end of each of the story's "chapters".

The first tool, and the one you're going to be most familiar with, is 007's iconic Walther PPK. James Bond carries a "License to Kill", and he's allowed to use it on even this procedural, bureaucratic mission - but you won't be counting too much on the gun to carry you through this game. It carries 8 rounds of .380 ammunition - which might be enough to down one to two of Blowhard's security team, but certainly isn't much!

M provides a few exciting tools, too. Bond's laser-watch allows him to open locked doors and cabinets, although it takes some time, so it's often a tactical decision whether or not it is worthwhile to spend extra time on a stubborn door when there are guards around.

The "underpants parachute" feels like a joke from the developers. In order to deploy it, you must type out the full phrase "deploy parachute" on the keyboard. You can do this anywhere in the game, but in most of the places where you're standing this will simply shoot a heavy and ungainly bundle of cloth out behind Bond, and you'll be forced to watch him awkwardly struggle his way out of the tangled ropes for what feels like an eternity.

There is exactly one place in the entire game where the parachute command is necessary: when dropped from Earnest Blowhard's Learjet, you have a full 2 clock minutes to remember the command, although if you deploy the parachute too early, too late, or not at all, poor 007 will be left as nothing but a faintly British crater.

The tool that you're going to lean on most often in this game is James's "Gentle Nudge" - not a tool at all, but instead a generous push that he can apply to reposition foes. As most of Blowhard's goons spend their time on precarious catwalks, standing next to wood-chippers, or peering into open vats of hydrochloric acid, the simple "push" turns out to be the most deadly tool in 007's arsenal. Simply pushing a guard into a wall will briefly stun them, and when pushed into any heavy or metallic object they will be knocked unconscious for quite a while.

This also reduces Mr. Bond's eventual paperwork, as the security guards who die from concussions and falls can simply be written off as workplace accidents.

Conclusion

This game's reportedly long development time - as a result of a protracted legal tangle with their intellectual property team - has done it quite a disservice, as it is unquestionably fun, but technically and visually unimpressive.

PROS

• Satisfying stealth gameplay.

• Fun puzzles.

• Bond – James Bond.

CONS

• Infuriating parachute joke.

• Last-gen graphics and sound.

SCORE

6.68

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COUNTERPOINT

Brett Doug: Awful. Every time I shoot the gun, I get swarmed by dudes and it's game over, and there aren't even enough bullets to finish a mission. I don't know how they managed to ship an incomplete, broken mess like this but I think Mike's score is way too high.

William Henderson III: While I wasn't terribly impressed by the goons' simplistic AI - outsmarting them proved troublingly trivial, even in the late game - I couldn't help but be charmed by the extended paperwork sections between the game's acts.

Trent Contrall: While it's fully believable that James Bond would have a license to kill, the state sanctifying and legitimating his use of force, what I struggle with is that he appears to be doing it for the good of humanity rather than in deference to the whims of private capital.

Riesling Brandt: I can't help but perceive a game released with last generation's graphics and sound technology as anything but a deep failing and an insult to me, personally.

Polly Mereyes: The game consistently allows any amount of water to break 007's fall without concern for height, so an alternate solution to the Learjet puzzle is simply to land in the palace's fountain.

Haymann Nieschott: I didn't have time to play it - perhaps ironically, I was at a black tie gala that day, drinking a martini - just as James Bond would like it, so dry that it was literally just a bottle of gin that I kept tucked in to my cummerbund.