Playing every PS1 game - 007: Tomorrow Never Dies

By virtue of the unlikelihood of releasing a game with a numerical title that comes earlier than ‘007’, the second game (and third, but that comes later) on the list is also a Bond game. However, unlike TWINE, which was clearly created with Goldeneye 007 in mind, this one takes a totally different approach.

007: Tomorrow Never Dies

TND is one that can slot into the ‘interested in at the time but never actually played’ column. I don’t remember contemporary reviews being particularly kind to it, so I imagine my desire stemmed from it being a ‘Bond game’ and that Bond games sounded cool (and also because I’d played Goldeneye a few times).

The story goes that development delays meant that by the time this game became available, the next Bond film (The World Is Not Enough) was about to come to cinemas - though it would be another year again before its own videogame counterpart was released.

TND is third person shooter in the late-90s mould - ie. Jankiness As A Service. My first thoughts were around it being curious that given the ridiculous success of Goldeneye, developers went with such a large departure for TND. Turns out, development for TND started before Goldeneye was released, so I suppose what we’re looking at here is more of an alternative experiment in early-ish 3D.

Apparently an early design had the game as an on-rails Virtua Cop clone. Does that target reticule look familiar?

The Bad

Straight away I can tell you that TND is not a great game. It’s not as bad as I was worried it might be, but the good ideas it does have are crippled by some dodgy execution and general jank.

The control system is your familiar ‘directional buttons to turn and move forward/back, shoulder buttons to strafe’ setup, and once you get the strafing figured out, it can be quite smooth. The problem is that while the directional buttons move Bond in a direction relative to the camera (ie. if you press up, he will move in whichever direction the camera is facing), the shoulder buttons (ie. strafe left and right) will only strafe Bond relative to the direction his character model is actually facing.

Don’t expect to get this close to a goon very often.

This knackers everything. If Bond is facing to the left (and so the camera is perpendicular to him), pressing the shoulder buttons will have him strafe effectively toward or away from the screen, while the camera has a fit trying to work out what to do. Frequent will be the situations where you can see your enemy clearly ahead, but you’re sidestepping towards him while firing off-screen - or the opposite, where you’re getting lit up by an off-screen enemy but simply cannot work out how to get the camera to move to face him.

In the game of the film, Paris doesn’t actually die. Don’t expect this departure to serve a narrative purpose.

The levels loosely follow the plot of the film, and I say ‘loosely’ here in the most robust of senses; the most you could say about being ‘faithful to the source material’ in many of the game’s stages is “Well, Bond was in a place that looked a bit like this at some point in the film”. A few levels (including the very first one) are just made up. This might be down to the apparent fact that the game was originally intended to be a sort of ‘sequel’ to the film, with its own plot. It makes sense. Some levels are outdoors and rather open - meaning you’re constantly being shot at by someone half a mile away - and some are indoors and a bit cramped. They shouldn’t need to be, but the camera, controls and level geometry combine to hinder your progress and induce bouts of swearing and controller-throwing. Far too often, Bond will get stuck on a door, or run stiffly into a wall, all while your health bar drains like a sink as off-screen goons open fire.

The shooting bit itself seems to be mostly luck of the draw. Enemy fire comes off as random, and each hit you take will take a notch off your health bar. So sometimes when facing up to a flurry of bullets, you might get hit once or twice; but other times a goon will fire off a few rounds and three-quarters of your health will disappear in a moment because every shot ‘hit’. Bad luck. The same works in reverse - you can unload a whole clip into a goon and only hit thin air, while other times they take two hits and immediately drop. It’s frustrating stuff.

Boss battles are tedious and frustrating, and you will die a lot (unless you use a cheap workaround).

One level lets you play as Wai Lin for no reason.

The Good

A few times while playing I was reminded of the first ‘game’ in Die Hard Trilogy - the run-and-gun one. It’s quite similar - start level, run through corridors finding goons to gun down, complete an arbitrary ‘objective’ (find object X/rescue Y/beat time limit Z), do some backtracking, head to the exit. TND occasionally changes it up though with a few wonky ski sections (just like in the movie), and then suddenly, out of nowhere, a fully functional driving level, where you chase down the crooks and blow them to pieces in your gadget-rigged Aston Martin BMW 750iL, complete with metal backing music.

Remember when Bond drove BMWs in the 90s?

I was so certain this would be disastrous when it started, but against all odds it actually works - there are no walls to get stuck on or bullet RNG here. An influence on the eventual creation of 007 Racing? Probably not, but it sticks out as something that they must have spent a bit of time working on, curiously so for just one set piece in one level. There are a few interesting elements like this - another is that upon completion of the first two levels (which should really just be one level), you’re treated to the TND opening credits sequence from the film…except all the credits are swapped with those of the actual game developers. It’s a cool idea.

The first ski minigame was fun. The second was the closest I came to just giving up on the game.

After slugging through things for a while in a cadence of suddenly losing almost all of my health, restarting the level, and repeating (and cursing the painful lack of checkpoints), I figured out how I think you’re actually supposed to approach the game. Most levels hide at least one ‘extra life’ pickup, which means that when your health gets zapped to zero and Bond flops to the floor with a death rattle, he instantly re-appears again with a refilled health bar, allowing you to carry on. These extra lives carry over between levels, and levels you have already completed can be replayed, so the obvious strategy is to ‘farm’ earlier levels for extra lives to allow you to tank hits and continue on the later, harder stages. I guess this is meant to extend your total game time, but bugger me, the gameplay is too frustrating to want to go through all that. However, once you do have a healthy set of extra lives in your pocket, the frustration does drop off and you can get into a good playing rhythm.

Overall

Unfortunately, you’re never more than a few moments away from that rhythm being broken. This is most often done by a goon spawning behind you (which happens all the time) and filling you with lead while you goose-step around trying to face him, but it could also be because you got stuck on a wall trying to turn a corner. It could be the frame rate plummeting any time the action picks up in an open area. It could be having to rely too much on a dumb exploit to make the difficulty tolerable (Example: the only way to win boss fights without burning through lives is to stunlock them with headshots till their health drops to zero). It’s a shame, as Playstation owners were waiting for their own Goldeneye. As it was, they’d have to wait until non-film related games on the PS2.

By the end of the game, your only realistic way forward is to peek around corners in first-person view and get off cheap shots.

Kept my attention for: A couple of days
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 4/10