And that leads us here as it became obvious after a short period of time that EA was refocusing it's efforts on a new iteration of the Bond theme. A game that would build on the graphical quality of TWINE and include all the best elements of previous Bond games with a new spin to create a worthy successor to the GoldenEye legacy (drumroll!) – enter 007 James Bond in…Agent Under Fire! (well, it's an impressive sounding title anyway!).

So have they finally done it? Well yes, and no. The end result is actually a bit of a mixed bag. Read on and you'll see what we mean.

Agent Under Fire is the first Bond game that doesn't use a 007 movie for it's storyline. Instead an original story was scripted but it basically plays out exactly like the plot of most Bond movies. In fact it's more like several Bond movies mixed into one and the game plays out in similar fashion. The story revolves around the tried and true plot of an arch villain's desire to take over the world, in this case one Adrian Malprave, whose plan is to replace world leaders with evil clones in order to achieve world domination.

Your job, as Bond, is to stop Malprave whilst being assisted along the way by Q, M and a sexy CIA agent known as Zoe Nightshade (by the way, fans of a questionable feature in DOA2 might enjoy some of the female characters in this game!). The assistance you receive is in the form of mission briefings, gadget kit-outs and radioed guidance or messages from M and Zoe. Unfortunately it's this assistance that ends up being one of the flaws of the game as a lot of the time the running commentary just makes you feel like you're going through the motions rather than doing anything proactive. Also it tends to take most of the thinking out of an already fairly simple game approach. Indeed the only difficult spots you'll encounter are ones where it's unclear what to do next because they didn't talk you through it.

There are 12 missions in the single-player game, 8 of which are played out as first-person shooter levels while the other 4 involve either free driving in the BMW Z8 or Aston Martin DB5 or one of 3 "on-rails" vehicle scenarios. Each mission is broken down into several objectives some of which change or are added mid-mission. Each completed objective acts as a respawn point should you die but you can only respawn if you have one of the 3 lives left that you started the mission with.

Although the mission briefings and the locations make the levels appear quite diverse they are actually all fairly simple, straightforward affairs relying more on your ability to blast away all your opponents than anything intellectual or cryptic. The first-person shooter levels in particular end up being quite ordinary and linear despite their good looks and lack good replay value due to only having one main way and route to completing objectives. If you're a fan of other first-person shooters on PS2 and PC you'll most likely find them very simplistic although they are fun in places and the occasional bits of clichéd Bond humour do add a fraction of relief to an otherwise paint-by-numbers affair.

The driving parts of the game though save Agent Under Fire from total mediocrity in the gameplay department. As mentioned earlier the driving can be divided into either "on-rails" or just straight out driving. The on-rails sections consist of leaning out of the sunroof of a BMW driven by Zoe around Hong Kong streets, manning the gun turret of a Russian tank in the streets of Bucharest and riding a small high-speed rail transport vehicle in an undersea base. These on-rails levels are essentially blast-fests where the only real objective is to blow stuff and people up but it's a lot of fun and really adds an excellent bit of variety to the gameplay.