It’s always tricky when a video game tries to bring a character from films or books to life. It gets even more so when the character in question has been a beloved fixture in modern entertainment, their stories entertaining generations of fans in many cases. James Bond is definitely one of those characters, and while there have been several attempts to create video games around him, there are only a few that stand out.
While First Light might manage to change that for the current generation of gaming hardware, there’s another Bond game from back in the day that immediately comes to mind when we think of titles that made us feel like we were MI6’s apex predator.
If you guessed Everything or Nothing, pat yourself on the back. It’s a game we absolutely loved back in the day, and is one we’d be down to play if you ever brought it up in a conversation. But why is that? What makes this one so special? We’re happy to tell you all about it, so let’s jump right in.
Being Bond
Where other experiences could often feel like licensed Bond video games, Everything or Nothing took a different route: it made you feel like you were in a playable Bond film. The man’s always been a jack of all trades, and has even become a master at many of them. That’s a distinction that other titles before this one failed to capture, doubling down on one aspect of an expansive skill set over all others, or trying to implement them only to bite off more than they could chew.
But in Everything or Nothing, you get to do everything Bond can do, and do it quite well as you begin to find your footing controls-wise, and learn more about enemy patterns and how to exploit them. Perhaps you decided to save your bullets for later, and take on your enemies the old fashioned way? Good for you, the melee system was fairly good, and you could always try to catch lone guards unawares. You could decide to try taking them all out stealthily on a whim, before a mistake derailed that plan, and your guns and gadgets came into play.
You could decide that your gadgets were your best tools in the field, bestowed upon you by Q himself and in the flesh this time. That cleverly wove in a sort of continuity with the films of the time while remaining a separate story with a seasoned hand behind its writing. That was a viable approach but with the game’s mission design and levels being the way they were, unpredictability underlined your time out in the field, and you were presented with action that was as cinematic as the tech of the time could manage.
It was an experience that felt unique, with fresh camera angles and a new POV to play with, all of which were backed up by a level of polish and the notion that the developers had as much fun making it as we had playing it. It felt like it was made for fans by fans, and that’s always a recipe for great entertainment in our book.
But of course, great presentation, visual polish, and narrative framing all work only if there’s a gameplay loop that can sustain them all throughout the experience.
Locked And Loaded
All of the great stuff we’ve talked about so far would have been for naught if the gameplay wasn’t up to par with the game’s world-building and excellent characterization of Bond. Everything or Nothing, however, managed to make playing as Bond feel like a power trip without making him feel invincible. That’s a balance that could be hard to achieve even for the best of games, and it’s especially praise-worthy considering how iconic the character it was trying to tackle already was.
Bond’s entire skill-set was at your disposal, but this one did well to take him all over the globe, and into various situations where he wasn’t going to succeed with just his guns and fists. You’d spend a fair bit of time in a gunfight before finding yourself in a very well-implemented sequence where you picked a vehicle and rolled with it. Another switch would have you trying to infiltrate areas as quietly as you could for an important objective.
Everything or Nothing paid homage to the films that inspired it by mimicking Bond’s penchant for improvisation, and how those moments of inspiration often let to set-pieces and spectacle before he returned to the shadows and hunted his prey from there. You had to be the best, your tenacity to adapt to a situation matching Bond’s own ability to shift from planned warfare to improvisational chaos, all executed with precision in the interest of his goals.
This was a game that took you from one Bond fantasy or another, carrying you away on a story that was exceptionally on-brand, and quite riveting to experience. It was exciting and brought excellent pacing on the narrative front, and enough variation in its gameplay to keep it that way throughout its runtime. Of course, its multiplayer options gave it a fairly long shelf life too, for those players who enjoyed it.
And the level of polish it brought to the table made it so immersive, it became almost as legendary as the man himself.
Shock and Awe
We’re now at the point where Everything or Nothing bridged the gap between the experience it had to offer, and the media that inspired the effort. Games that tried to emulate the movies with varying levels of success were already around (remember GoldenEye?). Exciting gameplay and a solid story are great and all, but it’s in how they were presented to us as players that made the game stand out.
Great graphics were backed up by scenes written to utilize them, and the set-pieces you played through brought the gameplay variety on offer to a crescendo, often requiring you to flit between guns, gadgets, and your skills in ways that showed just how well it understood the character and how his adventures often unfold. It was a sublime balance of great pacing, with scenes that used their locations to create unique dangers and challenges, improvisation using all the tools in your arsenal to respond to threats, and dealing with sudden escalations that were designed for adrenaline rushes.
Spectacle and set-pieces were made even better by a level of polish that we found very impressive. It brought the entire experience together, making it akin to what a Hollywood production looked like at the time. It was hard to tell whether Everything or Nothing was a video game or one insane interactive film with Bond in the leading role.
It wasn’t all perfect, though, with the game’s camera being somewhat limited, while some mission designs felt a tad dated. A recurring annoyance was the cover system that would get finicky and have us on the backfoot in intense fights from time to time. We’d also say that combat could feel rather simple once you understood how to operate with precision against your enemies. That would make the ranking system feel like it worked too well in your favor, which further simplified combat.
And yet, when those complaints could also lead to awesome moments and great memories, we found ourselves learning to live with them for a greater good, in a title that has remained among our favorite Bond experiences. Of course, we’re quite curious to see if First Light has paid attention to what’s great about this one, and how it could utilize those aspects in a way that elevates what it’s trying to do with the character.
The version of Bond we play in Everything or Nothing isn’t the one we’re seeing in First Light, and the upcoming exploration of his early days needs to take an insightful look at what that could mean, and craft ways to showcase his inexperience in the field. This is a take on Bond where he’s potentially more vulnerable, and weaving that into the usual charm and charisma that the character brings could lead to some great moments in the new game.
Of course, First Light choose an entirely different direction for the character, but the fundamentals of presenting everything we know and love about Bond in ways that feel faithful to the character are important. There’s a need for a balance between familiarity and freshness in any Bond-focused video game, but we will say that what we’ve been seeing so far has been pretty impressive indeed. It needs to let its gameplay and narrative framing wrap around the feeling of being Bond on the road to becoming a legend, just as Everything or Nothing designed itself on presenting him at his peak.
And that’s probably this title’s biggest strength. It wasn’t great because Bond could do cool stuff in it. That was something so many other titles had already managed with varying results. It was great because it uses all that cool stuff to make you feel like you’re Bond himself.
Everything or Nothing took the effort to make its players not just play as Bond, but to actually feel like him as they went gallivanting around the globe on missions. And that made all the difference.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
