Oddities aside, combat doesn't get as frustrating as GoldenEye's worst moments, and Blood Stone's highs are just as high, making this area overall feel more polished. It's fairly annoying to line up a perfect shot only for it to get borked, but after a while you learn to take this into account. Aiming does have an odd quirk when in cover, though: here you can align the crosshair, but when you pop out to fire off a shot it moves along with the screen.
While the Splinter Cell-esque mark-and-execute mechanic from the HD version didn't make the jump to the small screens, the overall shooting works better here than it did in GoldenEye: weapons feel both more accurate and effective, so you won't have to unload a whole clip into a baddie before they drop. It's much easier to make sense of what's going on here than in GoldenEye, too, as its storytelling is more cohesive and doesn't require familiarity with any other material than what's presented.
It uses the same voice acting as its big sibling, featuring an impressive amount of spoken dialog from Daniel Craig, Dame Judi Dench, Joss Stone and others, used for many more elaborate in-engine cutscenes during stages and between-mission briefings. Just as GoldenEye on DS did, Blood Stone 007 sticks with the same viewpoint as its console counterpart, boosting the DS's pithy third-person shooter count with a well-made adventure that has the first original Bond game story since last gen's stellar Everything or Nothing.īrosnan-era Bond screenwriter Bruce Feirstein is behind the story, told in a bit more ambitious manner than GoldenEye DS attempted. Whereas Nintendo console gamers only get one James Bond shooter this fall, with the first-person GoldenEye 007 on Wii and third-person Blood Stone on HD platforms, DS owners get their pick of the litter with diminutive versions of both courtesy of developer n-Space.