Bond's up against the credit crunch, and it's a fight he's currently losing. With the economic downturn crippling MGM, the next film has been put on indefinite hold - but in the vacuum left by Sam Mendes' AWOL Bond 23 there are to be two games launched this year, the first a reimagining of GoldenEye for the Wii and the second being Blood Stone, an all-new action hybrid from Bizarre Creations.
"I wish we were launching a movie," quips Michael G Wilson - who has helped Barbara Broccoli overlook the series since 1985's A View to a Kill - as he launches the game. With the amount of talent behind it, Blood Stone is almost as good as; Daniel Craig lends his likeness and voice, and he's joined by series' stalwart Dame Judi Dench as M.
There's new blood too in the shape of Joss Stone, with the Devonshire girl landing the impressive double header of both a role as a Bond girl as well as belting out the theme song, a number co-penned by the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart. She's pivotal to Blood Stone's bespoke story – written by Bob Feristein, a man familiar with the series having penned Tomorrow Never Dies and lent his hand to GoldenEye and The World is Not Enough – which excuses the globetrotting that's expected of the series.
Bangkok, Istanbul, Siberia and the South of France are just some of the locations in Blood Stone's itinerary, but for the first demonstration it's Athens that provides the backdrop. It is, of course, Athens as seen through a champagne glass, all pearls and glamour as it opens in the midst of a party on the steps of the Acropolis.
Dench reprises her school mistress turn as M, briefing an airborne Bond who spectacularly parachutes his way into the action. It's an introductory cutscene with all the pizzazz and action that's the series' trademark, and it sets up a tale that's typically and unmistakably Bond. A researcher has gone missing and is feared dead, and 007's teamed up with Joss Stone's socialite Nicole Hunter (who is "a posh Paris Hilton", as Stone herself reveals) to find him. The rest is being kept under wraps, though we're told it'll feature a group of terrorists headed up by the villain of the piece, Greco.
As for gameplay, Blood Stone is pretty familiar stuff – a blend of cover based gunplay and hand-to-hand combat, it's a third-person shooter that's learnt much of its repertoire from Uncharted and Gears of War. It has, to Bizarre's credit, learnt it well, and as Bond fires his way through the innards of a millionaire's yacht the shooting looks solid and precise, the cover system snappy and reliable and the explosions delivered with conviction.
If there's one disappointment it's that Blood Stone's visuals don't look too far beyond those of Treyarch's workmanlike Quantum of Solace, with Bizarre's bespoke engine (created, as is the rest of Blood Stone, by the team behind Marmite shooter The Club) failing to dazzle. But more positively it seems that Blood Stone won't be making the same mistakes as Bond's one-note last big game outing, and there's a fair bit of spice thrown into the third-person mechanics.
Foremost of these is the Focus Aim system: successfully pull off a melee takedown and it'll help unlock a bullet-time-like mode wherein enemies are highlighted and headshots are simple as pie. "I don't think it's a massively rocket science idea in games," admits Blood Stone's producer Nick Davies when the similarity to Splinter Cell Conviction's Mark & Execute feature is pointed out. "I suspect they had the same issue as us. We had this hand-to-hand combat system that people weren't using, so we use it as feedback to encourage people to sneak around."
That hand-to-hand combat is simple in execution – a single button press is all it takes to flatten someone – but quite glorious to watch, thanks in part to the employment of Bond stuntman Ben Cooke for Blood Stone's choreography. It also plays up to the thuggish physicality of Daniel Craig's take on the character, and in that respect it's faithful to Bond's most recent cinematic outings.
And then there's the driving. Surprisingly, given Bizarre's pedigree with Project Gotham, it's not as prominent as was first speculated – there's to be a mere handful of vehicle sections in the final product – but unsurprisingly it's looking perfectly competent. The run and cover gunplay of the brief demonstration is punctuated first by a speedboat chase, bolting through a harbour as Bond dodges RPG fire and ducks under swooping helicopters, and later in an extended section behind the wheel of an beautifully realised Aston Martin DB9. Here the handling looks manageable and is skewed towards action - though it's admittedly far removed from the likes of Project Gotham and Blur.
Racing unfortunately won't be a part of multiplayer, though there's little other news of this aspect of Blood Stone besides - aside from the news that it will support up to 16 players in game modes that promise an alternative take on online staples. "There's no point doing deathmatch when there's Call of Duty," says Davies wisely, "so it's something a bit different."
In isolation each of Blood Stone's elements don't look best in class, but it's looking like they could work together to create a Bond game that'll be comprehensive and, most importantly, fun – something that Bizarre has never failed to deliver regardless of what genre its applied itself to. And if they can piece it together, Blood Stone could well shoulder the burden of being this year's de facto Bond experience.