007 Legends is a fresh approach at a James Bond game. This isn’t a movie tie-in to the latest film, or even a rehash of an older game like GoldenEye. Instead, Legends touches on Bond’s older films and lets the player tackle some of the agent’s more iconic adventures. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with 007 Legends is that instead of going deeply into any one plot, it skims five different ones and each story tends to lose a lot of punch.

That being said, the game’s presentation leaves little to be desired. The modernized locations of classic settings combined with a large number of voice actors and likenesses makes Legends feel like a solid Bond experience.

While Daniel Craig does not voice Bond, his face is used in all five adventures, regardless of which actor played the agent in the films. Other actors like Dame Judi Dench as M have become staples in the more recent Bond games, but there are also a lot of classic actors that reprise their original roles. Richard Kiel returns as Jaws, Harold Sakata is Oddjob, Honor Blackman’s and Gert Frobe’s likenesses are used for Pussy Galore and Goldfinger respectively, while Robert Davi reprises his role as Fran Sanchez from License to Kill. Though, not every character looks like their silver-screen counterpart. Neither Halle Berry’s face nor voice is used for Jinx from Die Another Day and the long-time Bond villain Blofeld is actually a mix of the three actors that played him.

While 007 Legends’s approach is a nice change from most Bond games, it just doesn’t seem like a deep enough experience. Each film last a couple of levels, and while you might feel like you are taking a lot of time to get through some enemy’s secret base, once it’s done, I found I often felt like the level was short and didn’t have a lot in it.

007 Legends takes you through the plots of Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill, Die Another Day and Moonraker and while the highlights of each film are firmly hit, I never really got the feeling that I was the suave MI6 agent who not only knew how to wield a gun, but also play some games of cat and mouse, both with the story’s bad guy and the femme fatale. Sure, Bond has weapons and cool gadgets, though his particular selection this time around is fairly limited, but there is so much more to him than just that, and that feeling just doesn’t come through in 007 Legends.

What it does have is a lot of gun play. 007 Legends boasts a healthy variety of weapons and an upgrade system that gives you the ability to customize those weapons to your liking, but more on that later. There are also three gadgets at Bond’s disposal. A watch that not only sings out a sonar ping to identify where people are around you, but it can also send out a beam that causes some objects to overheat. This is good for taking out cameras or causing some objects to squawk and distract guards. Another is your cell phone that can be used to take pictures, scan the electromagnetic frequency (in order to sleuth out hidden panels and switches) as well as a mode that lets you see and scan fingerprints, which is great for getting past doors locked by keypads. The last gadget is a pen that shoots out darts. These will either put their target to sleep, electrocute it, or cause a noise to be emitted, again for distracting guards.

In case you haven’t guessed yet, there is a good bit of stealth in 007 Legends, a bit more than past games. Most of the areas that require some sneaking around can be gotten through with guns ablaze, but you will have to take down more enemies than you would otherwise. But not every stealth area can be gotten through with bullets, and if you don’t get a good handle on being quiet, you will find yourself repeating those areas a lot … which wouldn’t be so bad if the load times between failed missions were shorter. As it is, each failed attempt, regardless of the situation really, ends up being a bit more tiresome as you spend an inexcusable amount of time waiting to get back into the game. I found this especially true during the first part of On Her Majesty's Secret Service where I not only had to ski my way down a mountain, but take out enemy forces and not hit a tree or get shot up myself.

007 Legends offers a variety of multiplayer modes, but I don’t believe there is anything new to the license this time around. There are some basic variations on Deathmatch modes, some King of the Hills and the like, but nothing you wouldn’t expect to see in most other modern first person shooters.

007 Legends has two styles of gameplay and they feel radically different. Classic Mode gives you health packs and armor to keep you alive. The other is Modern and it uses regenerative healing where you can take some damage and then duck behind cover to rest a bit and regain your health. Both styles feel right as far as how frequent the health packs occur or how long it takes to regain your health, but outside of those two styles, there are also three different difficulty settings.

There is a noticeable jump in difficulty between each mode and it really comes down to how much damage each hit you take deals. That being said, getting a handle on the upgrade system for both your weapons and your own skill set can go a long way to making the game easier to get through.

007 Legends has a lot of running and gunning, or if you prefer, stealthy sneaking around tactics. It also has options that let you stay low to the ground and hidden in shadows. Unfortunately, when you start the game off, Bond feels both slow and clumsy. With enough XP though, you can start buying upgrades, both for your weapons and for Bond himself in the form of Training Modules.

Weapon upgrades come in three varieties: barrel, below the barrel and above the barrel. Below the barrel can be anything from a larger magazine clip to a laser pointer, while above the barrel typically consists of various scopes and sights. The last category is your ability to use silencers, compensators or even the option to make your gun fully automatic. There are two issues I have with this system. One is the fact that you can only have one of each type of upgrade on a weapon at a time. Sure that makes sense for scopes and objects that get added to the end of the barrel, but why does having a larger magazine preclude me from also having a laser sight under the barrel? The other is the fact that you can buy these upgrades at any time and place, but you can only add them to your guns at designated MI6 upgrade locations. It just feels weird and pointless to buy the upgrades while not at a place where I can actually modify my guns.

Training Modules are the same way. There are nine different upgrades you can buy that do everything from making the lock-on system work better to making you more quiet when you sneak around or able to shoot while running better, but you can only have three of these equipped at any given time and you can only switch out the equipped modules at the designated upgrade locations. While I liked the upgrade system and it added a nice bit of customization to the game, not being able to switch my loadout and training at any time felt like an artificially applied restriction. It might not feel that way if you can only buy upgrades at the upgrade locations, but being able to buy them at any point and only apply them at certain places gives mixed signals.

007 Legends tries to break out of the box in a few ways and there is a lot of room for improvement, but in its current state, I can only recommend the game to die hard Bond fans who already know the stories of these five movies really well. Much like a Dragon Ball Z fighting game, there is a lot of story left out of each of these movies and only by knowing the films well already will you be able to enjoy the game’s story. Hopefully we will see more games like 007 Legends in the future that have a bit more polish to them, but as it is, this game is a rental at best.