14 DAY TRIAL // There's a demo of the upcoming Quantum of Solace videogame in the wild and, because of a certain interest in all things Bond and Call of Duty powered, I got it this morning and played it. It seems interesting at first sight and we could just have on our hands the beginning of another long and successful franchise for Activision.
The game begins with a bit of very Bond like credits showing off the developer Treyarch, which also created Call of Duty: World at War, and, oddly enough, a commercial for Cola Cola Zero, which seems to be the official beverage of Bond, alongside the “shaken not stirred” Martini he enjoys in the movies. Well, I am all for advertising in games, if it manages to offset some of the production costs, but associating a popular non alcoholic drink with Bond kinda breaks the immersion in a videogame.
The demo is pretty short and has James Bond chasing some guy through a network of sewage pipes and old Roman looking aqueduct elements. It manages to convey what we might expect in the full game. The cover system is especially important, with E used by default to pop in and out of cover. Shooting while hiding behind stone walls is hard and you have to aim through the sights to be able to get the bad guys. Bond's health also goes down pretty fast and you must be on the look out for those enemies that try to come close, because you can die pretty quickly in the close combat action that follows. Oddly, the underground network also harbors some high explosive packages which you can detonate. I am also cheerfully expecting to see explosives stored in other places Bond would visit, like casinos.
The game is set to arrive on November 4 in North America and it will really need something special from Bond to gain significant sales in a market which is also expecting Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2 to launch.