As with the Nintendo 64 version of The World is Not Enough, the best part on the PlayStation is the variety of gameplay modes. While this James Bond title has brought the camera from the 3rd person to the 1st person, it hasn’t stopped Black Ops from making nearly every stage introduce a new, unique element. One level you’ll be skiing down the slopes of mountains, and the next will have you playing blackjack in order to earn enough money to bribe someone for information. A few of the ideas don’t pan out as well as they could have (the most common has to due with control issues, or other times, there’s no specific reason at all, it’s simply that they’re not that fun), but the despite that, the implementations that did come together are pretty cool.

The bar of quality for first person shooters on the PlayStation has been considerably raised because of Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor series, and one of the areas where The World is Not Enough falls behind the pack is in its graphics engine. Some of the problem can be attributed to the aging of the PlayStation hardware, but otherwise, it’s disappointing because most of the game’s levels, besides the one that involve a severe departure such as skiing, are square, boxed areas that connect to more square, boxed areas. Also severely lacking are the character models for Bond, his friends and his enemies. Comprised of an extremely low amount of polygons resulting in a low amount of detail, the animation is merely half decent. In addition to that, the game as a whole is terribly pixelated.

Taking control of Bond is relatively easy: movement is accomplished with either the left analog or directional pad, depending on your preference. The game takes GoldenEye approach of aiming (of which I’m not particularly fond of) of pressing the R1 button in order to switch to ‘sniper mode’, allowing you to move the cursor around the screen. Black Ops has made the aiming seemingly automatic, but unless you’re able to move the cursor within a few centimeters of the character, it won’t center in on them. This becomes the most troubling during times when multiple enemies are raining bullets down from high buildings, the auto aiming can’t enable and lining up the cursor takes a few seconds. The sniper mode also seems to be a bit on the sensitive side, since even after using both the directional and analog pads, it was difficult to get a sharp aim on someone without wasting valuable seconds.

There’re also a few irritating gameplay occurrences that I ran into during my adventures, one of which dealt with the alarms. You can set them off, but turning them off does, other than ridding of the annoying loud sound, absolutely nothing. Guards continue to magical appear from out of nowhere, and usually from behind your back, where you can’t see. I tried standing around for a few minutes to see what would happen, and even though the alarm was clearly off, the swarm of enemies continued to flood through. Another is that at the end of some levels it requires you to trigger an event within a few seconds or else the mission is failed. This might be breaking a window and leaping out, or using a latching a cable to a hot air balloon. This adds tension to the scene, but if you fail to accomplish the feat, you have to start the entire level over, and sometimes the goal of what you’re supposed to do isn’t all that clear.

Black Ops previous Bond effort, Tomorrow Never dies, wasn’t spectacular, but it was more entertaining than The World is Not Enough. The technology is behind the curve, the control is too sensitive and cumbersome, but the variation in gameplay saves the title from the ever-increasing abyss of forgetful games based on movies. Worth a rental only if you’re a fan of the movies.