And while 007 might act like a spy he moves like a truck, with a wide turning circle and sticky, finicky controls working together to make the game’s staple cover-to-cover navigation gummy and cumbersome. By the end of the second level, Blood Stone has shown its true colours: not content with being slightly – ever-so-slightly – above average, Bizarre Creations has worked hard to create a befuddled mess – one that haphazardly scrambles its way across a few locations for the course of an afternoon before closing on one of the most ridiculous, unexplainable and tedious endings I’ve ever encountered in a video game.īond spends his precious 5 hours trying to work out why the game is called Blood Stone (though nobody ever attempts to fumble up an explanation) while gunning his way across the globe, sometimes taking the time required to shoot waves of identical henchmen in the forehead – usually from behind the cover of a chest-high object. It’s all very okay.īut then it all goes completely tits up. There’s even a virtual rendition of how Dame Judi Dench would look if somebody made a scale copy of her face out of Play-Doh, and then accidentally dropped it on the floor. You’ve got some jazzy opening credits – just like in the movies – where Bond punches people so hard they pop into diamonds, and Joss Stone also does a bit of singing. There’s a chase, some explosions and a bit of shooting right after a cutscene where Bond parachutes out of a plane and kicks somebody to death.