Any enemy within a few feet of you can be swiftly and brutally taken down with a single button press. Fortunately, Blood Stone is also a game that incentivizes stylish melee combat as a complement to shooting your way through a situation. The cover mechanics are intuitive and responsive, while weapon sound effects and enemy animations harmonize nicely to make for an impactful shooting experience-though a lack of variety in weaponry and enemy types holds back the core gunplay. Played purely as a third-person shooter, Blood Stone is solid, though a bit unspectacular.
That said, on-foot combat is what makes up the bulk of your adventure.
Ultimately harmless in their simplicity, these moments of espionage don't detract from the gameplay so much as they pad it with repetitive filler-every scan feels the same, and there's generally little context for why something needs hacking.īrutal melee moves are easy to pull off from behind cover, so it's a good idea to let bad guys come to you. Pulling open your impossibly powerful smartphone allows you to scan and manipulate your surroundings, performing tasks such as cloning hard drives and cracking security points with little more than the press of a button. The gadgets are the only major weak link.
To run the full list, Blood Stone is simultaneously a third-person shooter with a heavy reliance on cover a stealth game that values melee takedowns over firefights a racer replete with frantic chase scenes and explosive tracks and a gadget-driven espionage simulator. Blood Stone is very much a hybrid of genres, a game that tries its hand at a lot of things and succeeds at most of them. The voices of Daniel Craig and Judi Dench add familiarity to the cast, while the brisk cutscenes do a good job of capturing the detached, no-nonsense demeanor of Craig-era James Bond.įor the most part, the variety established by the globe-trotting plot is echoed in the game's action. At any given point, you might find yourself amid a gunfight in Monaco taking cover behind a craps table speeding your Aston Martin across the cracking ice sheets of a frozen Siberian river or darting across the rain-slick rooftops of Bangkok not five minutes after gazing at majestic humpback whales inside an aquarium. It's a story that succeeds not because of any emotional connection to the proceedings, but because of the sheer variety of situations Bond winds up in. You begin the game on a hunt to track down a weapons dealer bent on terrorizing the G20 Summit, but a tangled conspiracy sends Bond all over the globe tracking down the usual array of informants, turncoats, and crime lords. There's no hiding the fact that the events driving Blood Stone's narrative are paint-by-numbers James Bond. Now Playing: James Bond 007: Blood Stone Video Review By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's