James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing Member Review for the PS2

The Good: Sounds good, looks good, excellent driving sections, Bond moments are satisfying

The Bad: Frustrating and mundane on foot sections, broken auto aim, no checkpoints, discovering the Bond moments can be a chore

I'm not really a James Bond fan, but I can't help but pass up a good action game no matter what the license is. Everything or Nothing is based off the film when Piece Brosnan was still the famous spy, and Everything or Nothing is pretty solid. The story is pretty nonsensical and is your typical Bond plot with a bad guy (Willam Defoe) hellbent on ruling the world. Diavolo has nanomites that can eat through metal, and plans on attaching payloads of this stuff on nukes. Bond runs into henchman (Jaws) and beautiful women to stop the evil mad man.

The best part about the are the vehicle sections, and the shooting sections are hard as all hell and mundane. I'm going to throw that out there right now. The vehicle sections have Bond driving real world vehicles with missiles, machine guns, flame throwers, and oil slicks attached to them. What makes the driving sections so grand is the sense of speed. Driving across a bridge, jumping through signs, finding shortcuts to trigger "Bond Moments". While these are hard to find (even in on foot sections) they can be satisfying. Every driving section is different from escorts to flying over rooftops to races. All vehicles handle very well even at high speeds and this is what truly matters.

The on foot sections are mundane and extremely frustrating. Even on the easiest setting the game throws dozens of bad guys at you and ammo is a loot and hunt type thing. You start out with a puny P99 pistol and the game throws about 10 bad guys at you. The lock on feature is clumsy since you can't lock on unless the camera is facing an enemy. If you get close enough to someone Bond will put his gun away and start meleeing while other guys around him are shooting. This can make you die in very tight spots. The melee is pretty basic with heavy and light punches along with counters. You can hide behind cover, but this tends to be a problem if the cover is taller then Bond can shoot.

You can a lot of gadgets, but they tend to be useless unless the level requires them. You get Q spiders which are remote operated spiders that can blow thing up and go inside little nooks. The coin grenades are pretty straight forward, but have crappy physics and bounce around like rubber balls. There's the nano suit which makes you invisible, but I never even had to use this since stealth in this game is very hard and almost not an option. The rappel gun is what I used most. Being a Bond game I wish the gadgets would have come in more handy, but they are they if you really want to use them. The shooting sections are just so frustrating due to the unbalanced difficulty. I died over 10 times on certain missions, and there are no checkpoints. Some of the longer levels have one, but most levels have none and this can make you throw your controller across the room.

The graphics are pretty decent for a 2004 PS2 game. The textures are solid, the audio is nice, and there is only slight framerate problems due to the PS2's limitations. There is online co-op, but this will never be tested since the servers were shut down. There's a lot of missions in this game, and it will keep you busy for a good 8-10 hours depending on how many times you die. The game is pretty solid and you won't be disappointed. Even people who don't like Bond can enjoy this game and that's the beauty of it.