Why 007: Agent Under Fire is a hugely forgettable use of the Bond licence
James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire (2001)
James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire (2001)
Where are all the Bond games lately? Twenty-five years after Goldeneye 007 for N64, we’re still waiting on some developer out there to recapture lightning in a bottle and come out with the ultimate system-selling, multiplayer extravaganza, with a beautiful Single Player campaign and replay value from unlockable cheat codes to boot.
But to do this, of course, they’d have to root the Bond game license out from underneath a load of cobweb-ridden boxes. Then they'll need to find a way that they could make the multiplayer a loot-box ridden nightmare.
You know, the type of full-time job multiplayer where it’ll cost you either 900 hours or $4.99 to unlock some Bond no-mark, like the baddie from For Your Eyes Only. And if you don't like it, Goldfinger will come round your house and laser your ghoulies off. Finally, they'll have to give the whole game the same old moribund Call of Duty gameplay that plagued Goldeneye Wii.
It sounds like a dastardly EA trick, but fortunately for us they’ve already had their crack at the Bond license, and brought us multiple 007 games during that now long-gone era of the GameCube, PS2 and Xbox.
Somewhere in EA’s conglomerate headquarters, which I imagine to be roughly the size of Iowa, there are some viciously evil suits still choking and spluttering over the missed opportunity. They had a lucrative licence with which to churn out games, but they only held onto it during an era when online price gouging wasn’t a thing. It could have been $1.99 a Bond tux, maybe $3.99 per forgettable henchman.
As I write, the youngest, evillest Patrick Bateman in EA begins running through these numbers in his head. Mulling over the millions of dollars lost in potential earnings, he parades around his 2-acre office, tweaking his suspenders, crying and having a tantrum over it, until an older, though much less senior Sensible Suit approaches him.
“Don’t worry, My Lord,” the Sensible Suit will say, proffering his hand on his liege’s shoulder, “we’ll get it back soon enough.”
Through tear-soaked hands, but with his slicked back, jet black hair intact, the young hotshot will look at him with the faintest sign of hope in his otherwise deadened, vicious eyes.
“With...microtransactions and everything…?”
The Sensible Suit smiles warmly, with a glint in his eye.
“Microtransactions and cosmetic DLC.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” cries the young master, as he hugs the Sensible Suit tightly, all the while thinking that he must remember to check that Suit’s salary, see if they couldn’t get rid of him somewhere down the line. Offer him a settlement. Perhaps threaten his family and coerce him into early retirement.
These thoughts swirls around his head for a few moments, before he dismisses the Sensible Suit from his dark, tightly air-conditioned office, sits back into his luxury chair (upholstered with endangered tiger skin) and begins a plan to get the Bond licence back. Somewhere deep down inside you, the 90s child is screaming for their lives.
Back to 2001, and a time when games were games and the Internet didn’t even have women, let alone people with money. Given that 007: Agent Under Fire came out right at the start of that ugly, still-blocky PS2 era, and given that the far better remembered Nightfire and Everything or Nothing came later, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this game is, at best, painfully average.
And God, you’d be right. Everything about the game screams average - or worse, naff. First of all, Bond neither looks like Pierce Brosnan (and I’m talking pre-gut Brosnan here, before he did Die Another Day) nor does he sound like him. They could have at least made an attempt to mimic Pierce’s strained BBC-Navan accent, but they elected not to bother.
I won't even get into how un-Judi Dench-like M is portrayed to be here, but you'll get a good laugh out of R's ridiculous look. Remember that awkward period of Bond between Desmond Llewellyn's retirement and the Casino Royale reboot, when John Cleese was the quartermaster? AUF is a game from those strange days.
The graphics aren’t exceptional either, even on the more powerful GameCube console, and the story is pretty far-fetched even taking into account the wider context of crazy Bondian tales. And that is saying something; those movies featured evil druglords turning into balloons and exploding, their intestines nowhere to be found. And let’s not forget when Grace Jones was put forward as a Bond Girl and preyed on a 73-year-old Roger Moore, God rest him.
Agent Under Fire is some nonsense about clones, and probably energy or something, and really you shouldn’t take too much notice of what’s being said in the cutscenes at too low a volume. That is, until a shapely woman comes on screen and Bond delivers his usual one-liners - then you should look up and watch. In that essence, maybe this game is closer to the films than I thought.
The most important facet, of course, is the gameplay. Or rather, the gunplay. Well, here’s where AUF makes you go “Auf, bloody hell”. I’ve often been a vocal critic of those games that purport to be shooters, only to stack the odds against you.
You find that the enemies fire ultra-high velocity, armour-piercing bullets at you, whereas you're left firing jelly. Medal of Honour did it. Daikatana did it. The Uncharted series did it repeatedly. But nowhere is it more apparent than in Agent Under Fire.
The enemies barely react to getting shot, either - they sort of do a spasm, or maybe it’s a shrug, as if they’ve caught your bullet on the shoulder and are about to volley it away with their left foot. Sometimes they move into scripted animations, like when they try to activate an alarm, and you can put six hundred bullets up their mush - nothing. They’ll feel nothing, and you’ll feel nothing but impotent rage.
And this is all worth noting, because Goldeneye 007 had all of these features and more. Of course, the enemy AI in that game is pretty rough nowadays but it was fun to mess around with them. In AUF, you sometimes feel as if you’d be better off feeding your gun to the enemies.
And my God are the automatic weapons inaccurate. Bust off one or two rounds, and you might hit your target. Keep the trigger planted, and your machine gun will snarl back at you and claim that it’s a shotgun instead, or it wouldn’t be dispersing your shots all over the room when you fire at enemies from more than six feet away. And of course, those rare golden bullets that do hit the enemies are harmless anyway.
I will say this though, the driving sections can be fun, and there’s a part where you have to commandeer a tank and go after a train. The Goldeneye parallels continue, although you can’t crush civilians beneath your treads, which is a shame.
Agent Under Fire is an odd case - a shooting game, that's at its best when you’re not shooting. That’s not even faint praise really, but the game wasn’t as painful an experience as I was setting myself up for. It’s got some good parts, but this is one of those games that you could never spent any more than ten bones on.
Lastly, there’s a multiplayer mode with bot capabilities too, although no bots for you if you’re on PS2. It’s a pretty threadbare multiplayer, of course, not a patch on Perfect Dark’s, or the infinitely superior Nightfire’s for that matter, but it’s there. But none of this is enough to save 007: Agent Under Fire from obscurity. Go back and fool around with its younger sisters instead - it’s what Bond would do.
17 October 2023