3/5 ★ – JCrab's review of 007: Tomorrow Never Dies.

While it's a vastly inferior game when compared to the likes of "GoldenEye" and "The World Is Not Enough", "007: Tomorrow Never Dies" does improve on a few small elements of those games, and it has more going for it mechanically. The addition of health packs and extra lives is greatly welcome, but admittedly those additions do feel more like apologies for how janky this game feels in comparison to those aforementioned titles. In terms of movie tie-in games, "007: Tomorrow Never Dies" is very much an above-average game, and it's a fair bit of fun when it's at its best. As a Bond game, it's a bit more on the average side, but there is still a lot of fun to be had here. The game's levels are largely enjoyable with a couple of exceptions. The guns generally feel nice, the missions never overstay their welcome in terms of length (once again, with one single exception), and there is a nice variety to the levels with added driving and skiing sections, even if the latter is hit-and-miss. When the game works, it really works, and it does say something that I beat it all in one sitting. On the flip side, this is also a very frustrating game in a lot of ways, despite it still being fun overall. The game is super janky, and the new third-person pov is a major reason for this. The camera often moves very wonkily, and Bond controls rather poorly when it comes to simple movement. I found myself occasionally frustrated with simply turning to shoot an enemy, and those frustrations got tiresome after a while. The second skiing section of the game is also ball-numbingly bad in terms of design, with an onslaught of enemies and obstacles being scattered randomly around the level to simply make it difficult without much rhyme or reason for their presence, and it's an astronomically annoying section. And just when I thought the skiing section was the worst part, on comes the penultimate mission, which is one of the most infuriating levels I've played in a game. It starts off rather fun, and I enjoyed playing as Michelle Youh's character, but the level is way too long and the enemies are irritatingly tanky, and they take so many hits to kill. It's not just hard or challenging, it's actually just bad game design in this instance, and I haven't been this angry with a game level in quite some time. All of that being said, I did actually like this game by the end. It's a fun way to relive a solid Bond story, and the game does mostly excel at gunplay and level design in my opinion. It's just a janky mess at times, and the game should never have been in third-person. It's a fun, albeit very flawed Bond game. GRADE: 6.5/10