Demo impressions: Quantum of Solace

1:22 PM on 10.10.2008   |   Anthony Burch

18 comments

Like most reasonable people, I loved both Casino Royale and Call of Duty 4. To hear, then, that Treyarch was making a first/third-person shooter based around the two most recent Bond movies built off the CoD4 engine, I was ... well, not excited, necessarily, because Bond is a license and we all know how licensed games turn out, but interested. Let's say interested.

After Phantom Spaceman alerted the c-blogs that a PC demo had been released, and after reading Dale's preview, I snatched up the demo and prayed that my barely-outdated laptop could stand it. Thankfully, I managed to get through the whole thing after knocking all the graphics options down to their lowest notches.

Read on after the jump for my impressions.

For those of you whose computers aren't badass to run the demo, it basically works out like this: Bond is in an MI-6 safehouse, hears some gunshots, and runs down some stairs to find a shady man standing over the corpse of a British intelligence agent. Bond dodges a few shots from the shady dude and spends the rest of the demo pursuing him through the underground tunnels of the safehouse.

Looking at some of the trailers and behind-the-scenes videos, I'm tempted to think that Treyarch picked one of the most boring levels in the game to turn into a demo. I don't mean this as an insult. The other movie-inspired levels look potentially badass (I'm looking forward to playing through the opening scene of Casino Royale in first person), and the demo level is decently entertaining in its own right -- it's not full of mind-blowing stuff and epic scenarios, but it got me used to the gun combat, melee, cover system, and scripted events. If this is the most boring that the game has to offer, the rest of the game could be pretty interesting.

The cover system works pretty well, the shooting mechanics are solid, and though the game doesn't feel as fast-paced as Call of Duty 4 due to the fact that every enemy you meet will hide behind cover and refuse to come out unless they decide to flank you, the gunplay was still decently fun. 

Generalities aside, I was struck by two specific things in the demo.

Firstly, the scripted sequences. Though the required, level-progression sequences are pretty obvious and not terribly interesting (near the end of the demo you'll chase the shady guy through a cave, only to be stopped every two feet by falling debris you have to either jump over or climb under), there was one moment during the first gunfight which legitimately surprised me. After shooting an explosive charge on a  walkway, the stone walls around it weakened.After a few seconds, water burst through numerous cracks in the concrete, spraying all over the place and making a considerable amount of noise. I didn't pay it any mind until a few seconds later when I realized that the water level around Bond was rising. Where Bond had previously been standing on totally dry ground, the water rose past his feet, up his shins, and over his knees within a matter of seconds.

Though it didn't effect the gameplay in any real way, I was genuinely surprised to suddenly see Bond half-submerged in water just because I shot an explosive. Call of Duty 4 turned a similar flooding scene into the centerpiece of an entire level: Quantum of Solace treats it like a throwaway spectacle, like it's not even that big a deal. "Yeah, you're up to your balls in water -- that's pretty cute," the game says. "So what? You're Bond. It's no big thing. Deal with it." 

Secondly, the melee takedowns. Though they'll almost certainly be controlled by simple QTE minigames in the console versions, I was really pleasantly surprised to see a slightly more involved, much more interesting way of dealing with them for the PC version. Rather than having to hit a single button within a certain amount of time, the player has to move the reticule into a small, circular zone on a baddie's body and click it before the highlighted circle disappears. Bond then executes the takedown as normal. It's a small touch, but the necessity of moving the mouse adds a little more interactivity to what would have otherwise been a dispassionate exercise in button-mashing. After taking out a few baddies with melee attacks, I began to wish that the console versions of QoS included a similar takedown mechanic, replacing mouse movement with joystick nudging. 

Though it was over very quickly, and though I'm still haven't decided whether I'm truly excited for the full game or just reasonably interested (if the gunplay isn't varied enough throughout the singleplayer campaign, I can imagine it getting very old, very fast), the demo is almost certainly worth a download for anyone with the computer to run it. One of the marketing blurbs at the demo's end claims that Quantum of Solace is "the best Bond game since Goldeneye." Even knowing full well how empty a statement that is, the demo at least convinced me that it might possibly be true.