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By Contributing Writer Rob Pecknold Rating: Crappy Tomorrow Never Dies is more of an insult than a game. After two long years of hype and delays, this is all we get from the developers at Black Ops? The game's story is exactly the same as the story in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies, meaning that it's the worst story of all the James Bond movies. A man named Eliot Carver owns a newspaper called Tomorrow that reports on all the breaking news the day before it happens, and so the agency that Bond works for assumes that Carver is trying to take over the world (aren't all newspaper editors?). So you, as James Bond, have to stop a gray-haired, pansy-ass little newsboy in a boat. Scary! Upon starting up the game for the first time, you can see all the missions in the game on the Start Mission screen, and you will be horrified to see that the game only has ten missions. Black Ops worked on this game for two years, and all they could come up with was ten stinkin' missions? Not only that, but most of the missions take five minutes or less to complete, resulting in a game that can beaten in one hour. The first three or four missions are actually very well done, with good pacing and decent voice acting. But after that, it all goes straight down the toilet. The control is particularly horrible. Using the analog stick and trying to move left or right usually results in you moving backwards instead. Also, the levels are poorly-designed, and they just aren't interesting to play in at all. There has been a lot of hoopla about the skiing and driving levels of Tomorrow Never Dies, but I've got bad news for you: They suck. The control is these levels leaves a lot to be desired, and the physics model is almost non-existent. The skiing level randomly makes you do tricks, which is both stupid and disorienting. Black Ops should have taken out the driving and skiing levels in Tomorrow Never Dies and spent the extra time improving the incredibly bad Artificial Intelligence. Sometimes, the enemies rush towards you, but other times they seem to sit back and do nothing. Also, there is a weird line of sight feature that is extremely inconsistent. It seems that no matter how far away you are from an enemy, they can always shoot you, and you have no way of shooting them back unless you go into the slow and awkward aiming mode. It's also unrealistic that you can take so many bullets before finally dying, especially after you've played games like Medal of Honor and Rogue Spear and grown to love their one-hit kills. Like the rest of the game, Tomorrow Never Dies' graphics are pretty bad. The textures are muddy, the enemies look bland, and Bond's arms tend to temporarily disappear for no apparent reason. Black Ops should be ashamed of themselves. Not only did they fail to make a game that comes close to Goldeneye 007, but they failed to make a game that is moderately entertaining in its own right. Send your thoughts on this review to rob@mastergamer.com
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