Tomorrow Never Dies Review


For PlayStation

By Contributing Writer Rob Pecknold

Rating: Crappy
   Tomorrow Never Dies is more of an insult than a game.  After two long 
years of hype and delays, this is all we get from the developers at Black 
Ops?
   The game's story is exactly the same as the story in the movie Tomorrow 
Never Dies, meaning that it's the worst story of all the James Bond movies.  
A man named Eliot Carver owns a newspaper called Tomorrow that reports on 
all the breaking news the day before it happens, and so the agency that 
Bond works for assumes that Carver is trying to take over the world (aren't 
all newspaper editors?).  So you, as James Bond, have to stop a gray-haired, 
pansy-ass little newsboy in a boat.  Scary!  
   Upon starting up the game for the first time, you can see all the 
missions in the game on the Start Mission screen, and you will be horrified 
to see that the game only has ten missions.  Black Ops worked on this game 
for two years, and all they could come up with was ten stinkin' missions?  
Not only that, but most of the missions take five minutes or less to 
complete, resulting in a game that can beaten in one hour.
   The first three or four missions are actually very well done, with good 
pacing and decent voice acting.  But after that, it all goes straight down 
the toilet.  The control is particularly horrible.  Using the analog stick 
and trying to move left or right usually results in you moving backwards 
instead.  Also, the levels are poorly-designed, and they just aren't 
interesting to play in at all. 
   There has been a lot of hoopla about the skiing and driving levels of 
Tomorrow Never Dies, but I've got bad news for you: They suck.  The control 
is these levels leaves a lot to be desired, and the physics model is almost 
non-existent.  The skiing level randomly makes you do tricks, which is both 
stupid and disorienting.
   Black Ops should have taken out the driving and skiing levels in 
Tomorrow Never Dies and spent the extra time improving the incredibly bad 
Artificial Intelligence.  Sometimes, the enemies rush towards you, but 
other times they seem to sit back and do nothing.  Also, there is a weird 
line of sight feature that is extremely inconsistent.  It seems that no 
matter how far away you are from an enemy, they can always shoot you, and 
you have no way of shooting them back unless you go into the slow and 
awkward aiming mode.  
   It's also unrealistic that you can take so many bullets before finally 
dying, especially after you've played games like Medal of Honor and Rogue 
Spear and grown to love their one-hit kills.  Like the rest of the game, 
Tomorrow Never Dies' graphics are pretty bad.  The textures are muddy, the 
enemies look bland, and Bond's arms tend to temporarily disappear for no 
apparent reason.
   Black Ops should be ashamed of themselves.  Not only did they fail to 
make a game that comes close to Goldeneye 007, but they failed to make a 
game that is moderately entertaining in its own right.

Send your thoughts on this review to rob@mastergamer.com

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