James Bond Video Games, Ranked

007 Legends was an attempt to create a sort of greatest hits shooter for Bond, featuring levels based on films by each actor who has played the role on screen alongside an obligatory competitive multiplayer mode. While critics thought it was cool seeing folks like Sean Connery and Timothy Dalton as Bond in their respective missions, there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for the game itself, which was said to feel like a pretty slipshod overall package. Reviewers hammered the obnoxious stealth mechanics, the incessant mini-games, and how all those different missions are supposed to be things that happened to Daniel Craig's Bond prior to Skyfall, even though he looks like a completely different person in each of them.

"The idea of an anthology-like tribute to Bond films of the past isn't a bad one, but 007 Legends wastes whatever potential for fun there might have been. Instead, all Bond fans are left with is a heavily rewritten, Cliff's Notes version of some great (and not-so-great) films with a bunch of forgettable shooting and stealth sequences shoved into the mix. Ultimately, nothing 007 Legends offers is worth the effort of trudging through it." —Alex Navarro, Giant Bomb

Despite the title, 007 Racing is not actually a game about racing cars. Instead, it tells an original James Bond story that the player experiences entirely through car-based sequences, the hook being that it puts you behind the wheel of some of the most iconic vehicles that Bond had driven in the films, like the classic Aston Martin DB5. It was a great idea, critics agreed, but the execution just wasn't there, with reviewers complaining about unpolished mechanics and confusing objectives during missions. The poor graphics also drew a lot of comments, especially since this PS1 game came out after the PS2 had launched in 2000, so it wasn't exactly state of the art for the time.

"One of the most novel gaming premises to come along in quite some time, (but) its poor gameplay mechanics and woeful graphics ultimately relegate it to that ignominious coulda-been, shoulda-been pile of underachieving PlayStation action titles." —CheckOut

You might expect based on the title that this game has something to do with the GoldenEye film or video game, but you'd be completely wrong. Instead, this is the story of an anonymous former MI6 agent who gets a gold cybernetic eye and battles against a series of famous Bond villains. On top of that bizarre bait-and-switch premise, critics said Rogue Agent was just OK in all meaningful respects, so they had a hard time finding any reason to recommend it. It doesn't seem to be that the game was particularly awful, but the misleading title clearly didn't leave anybody feeling generous.

"A case of an incredibly stupid concept averagely executed. Just who this is supposed to appeal to, we do not know." —Games Radar

Blood Stone tells an original James Bond story featuring the likeness of Daniel Craig as Bond, and with pop singer Joss Stone (no relation) providing the title song and playing the "Bond girl." Critics felt that Blood Stone was well put together and enjoyable enough with its short campaign and standard slate of multiplayer modes, but rarely excelled at anything that the devs at Bizarre Creations were trying to do with it. Making the situation a little bit worse was the fact that it came out on the same day that Activision released a remake of the N64 GoldenEye. Blood Stone suffered by comparison, but that may have been more about GoldenEye nostalgia than anything Blood Stone did.

"Blood Stone makes for a good weekend rental, or an 'in between' title, but it doesn't offer a lot more than that." —Steven McGehee, Digital Chumps

From the developers at Treyarch, best known for their many contributions to the Call of Duty franchise, this is another Bond game with a moderately misleading title. Amusingly, 007: Quantum of Solace takes the frame of the movie it's named after but essentially throws in the entire plot of Casino Royale as a flashback for the bulk of the campaign. Reviewers thought that combination left the story feeling unnecessarily convoluted, but they otherwise thought the game was decently fun to play even so. It just never added up to anything particularly interesting.

"Quantum of Solace isn't a terrible game but it is certainly not the game I expected it to be. Treyarch spent too much time trying to convert a WWII engine into something viable for a secret agent game, and we end up with a gun-toting thug in a tux rather than the sophisticated secret agent we all love from the books and the movies." —Mark Smith, Game Chronicles

This title, the last in the franchise published by EA, featured the likeness of Sean Connery in this adaptation of the classic Bond film From Russia With Love. The game follows Bond's battles against the villainous organization SPECTRE—which is known in this game as OCTOPUS because of convoluted rights issues. Most critics found this one to be amusing enough, though it suffered in comparison with the previous Bond game, Everything or Nothing, which came out the year before.

"It lacks any measure of challenge, playing out more like a shooting gallery in spots than a proper action game. And above all else, it simply lacks that spark--that thrilling feeling that wasn't just one key part of 'Everything or Nothing,' but rather, was the entire essence of what made that game so enjoyable." —Alex Navarro, GameSpot

Originally planned as an adaptation of the 1999 film The World Is Not Enough, this game was delayed and reworked to make use of an original storyline in which Bond must fight a corporation called Indenticon that is attempting to replace world leaders with clones that are loyal to the company. While that may sound silly (and it is), reviewers actually were into the story quite a bit. What they didn't like as much was how on-rails the levels tended to be, how easy it was to get through, and how short the whole thing ended up being.

"The game that is supposedly there to make you feel like Bond, ironically ends up achieving the opposite at times because of the scripted and rather linear nature of the proceedings - there's simply too much 'guidance by hand' to really convince you that you truly ARE Bond." —Corey Brotherson, Games Domain

James Bond (bearing the likeness of Pierce Brosnan) must take down a major corporation that's trying to use a militarized space station to control the world, like a less-apocalyptic Moonraker, in this original story. Critics liked this one, though their enthusiasm was curtailed a bit by the fairly short length of the story. Or at least they liked the console version. The PC version, which was rebuilt in a different game engine by Gearbox instead of directly porting the console version, drew much worse reviews for being a technical mess and missing significant features, like the driving sequences.

"It's true that it won't make you forget 'GoldenEye 007', but it's the closest a Bond game has come to that level of quality in years." —G4 TV

An adaptation of the film of the same name, The World Is Not Enough was the first new Bond game for the Nintendo 64 after GoldenEye. That meant it had a lot to live up to, even though it was made by a different studio, with Eurocom taking over from Rare. Despite being very similar to GoldenEye, it wasn't able to pull that off, say critics—but it may have been the similarities to its predecessor that were the problem. While it was fun, it was also more of the same several years later. But the N64 version fared better than the PS1 port, which (like NightFire's PC version) was such a mess that it earned a Metascore 20 points lower. You don't see that very often, much less twice in the same series.

"Eurocom does the amazing by putting out a sequel to Rare's 'Goldeneye' that actually lives up to the high standard set for it. What a shame that Rare's own pseudo-sequel, 'Perfect Dark,' already did the same thing at least twice better." —Core Magazine

This one isn't quite a faithful remake of the original GoldenEye game, since it reimagined the story for Daniel Craig's Bond, and made use of the Nintendo Wii's motion controls for a drastically different shooting experience than we had on the Nintendo 64 back in the '90s. Those changes didn't bother critics much, though they admitted the new game didn't really live up to the original—but, realistically, nobody was really expecting it to, so they didn't hold that against it too much. Instead, they seemed to appreciate most of the new wrinkles that Activision included to make the experience feel fresh. It's a rare example of gamers and reviewers alike being in favor of a publisher making fundamental changes to a classic.

"GoldenEye is not the remake many were expecting, and it doesn't live up to the original. GoldenEye is its own game, a new entry on James Bond's series, with great plot and gameplay and, even more important, one of the best FPS out there for the Nintendo Wii." —Ramón Méndez González, Meristation

*The 2010 version of GoldenEye was later released on PS3 and X360 as GoldenEye 007: Reloaded with enhanced graphics.

New Bond games came at a fast and furious pace after the blockbuster success of the GoldenEye game, but in that mad rush they never managed to put out a Die Another Day game. But EA did manage to push out this Die Another Day sequel story, which serves as the capper to Pierce Brosnan's turn as James Bond. The reception from critics was enthusiastic, though there was a bit of a sense of "been there, done that" to it as well, since it lacked online multiplayer—it was good, but simply not a landmark the way GoldenEye was. That's not a bad place to be.

"It's been a while since I played a game with such engaging, pure, and thrilling action, and on top of the excellent single-player game, there's a pretty cool co-op mode to nicely round out the package." —Electronic Gaming Monthly

IO Interactive, which is coming off its brilliant Hitman: World of Assassination trilogy, is releasing the first new Bond game in 14 years. First Light tells a new, original version of James Bond's origin story, and how he earned his 007 codename. Even more interesting is that First Light's plot isn't the only thing that's original—we've also got a fresh James Bond, played by Patrick Gibson, whose tale has no relation to any previous Bond story. That's unusual for the Bond game series, which has used the likeness of a Bond movie actor for nearly every previous 3D game. 007: First Light isn't just the first new Bond game in 14 years—it's the start of a new era for Bond games. And fortunately it's a good one, with critics calling it one of the best Bond games of all time—possibly even the best Bond game of all time.

"007 First Light is easily the best James Bond game since GoldenEye and is also one of the better Bond stories told in the last decade. IO Interactive has created a game that is a culmination of all of their best mechanics over the years. 007 First Light has the addicting sandbox gameplay of the Hitman franchise while also having an incredible narrative that matches the quality of Naughty Dog and Rockstar Games. James Bond is finally back and is better than he's been in years." —Brent Koepp, Vice

Three decades later, GoldenEye has a much greater legacy as a video game than it does as a movie. While the gritty Daniel Craig films made the hokey Brosnan movies feel like a franchise footnote, the game version of GoldenEye remains the franchise's gold standard on the video game side. A lot of that is due to its status as the first popular multiplayer shooter for consoles, since that meant it was both fun and fresh—while the Bond games that tried to follow up GoldenEye were merely fun. Being a pioneer matters, it turns out.

"We can say with a clear conscience that Goldeneye 007 is the best single-player first-person game on any system." —IGN