007 Legends' Derby based developer Eurocom's follow up to the warmly received GoldenEye: Reloaded trades in nostalgia, and does so in spades. For the most part the efforts to effectively reboot the major story beats of Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Licence to Kill, Die Another Day and Moonraker through the eyes of current 007, Daniel Craig, are admirably effective.
It's only truly jarring when you have to watch Craig scan an office for evidence using a Sony's Xperia smartphone, or get behind the wheel of a modern day Aston Martin, when Legends starts to get a bit choppy. It's just unfortunate then that the game borrows so heavily from that other Activision monster brand - Call of Duty. If fact, it mimics so much of Infinity Ward's behemoth that a lot of the time it feels like your playing through a poor man's COD masquerading as a Bond game.
Stealth does haves its part to play in the campaign but these sections are marred by the heavily flawed game design. Each time you're tasked with a little sleuthing the end result is almost always the same - a scramble for the nearest checkpoint in a desperate attempt to dodge a bullet. 007 Legends isn't completely devoid of brilliance - take a bow On Her Majesty's Secret Service - but it's simply not enough to detract from the infuriating level design, colourless vocal performances and a studio's worrying reliance on the Call of Duty playbook. Make it a rental at most.