YMMV / 007 Legends

• Awesome Music: One thing that can be said in the game's favor is that the tense, pounding, orchestral rendition of the "Goldfinger" theme song that plays over the opening credits sounds absolutely phenomenal.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Since enemy corpses can't be moved and result in other enemies inevitably discovering them and raising alarms, it is often suggested that players avoid stealth altogether and go through each level guns blazing.
• Complete Monster:
  • Auric Goldfinger is a gold-loving businessman out to enrich himself by any means necessary. When James Bond begins investigating him, Goldfinger murders his assistant and paints her corpse gold as a warning. Goldfinger plans to fatally gas Fort Knox and the surrounding area, then detonate a nuclear bomb to plunge the US into economic crisis and raise the value of his own gold. When Bond is captured, Goldfinger tries to cut him in half with a laser and later handcuffs him to the bomb so he'll be vaporized when it detonates.
  • Ernst Stavro Blofeld is the mysterious leader of SPECTRE, an international criminal organization specializing in terrorism. Blofeld's latest scheme is to threaten to release a deadly virus into several major cities around the world unless he's paid by the UN. Blofeld also kidnaps Bond's love Tracy di Vicenzo, bragging that she won't remember Bond's name after he's done with her and plans to blow up his own base when Bond's allies attack it. After his seeming death, Blofeld returns to make an attempt on Bond's life, killing Tracy in the process.
  • Gustav Graves here lacks the redeeming qualities of his original version and is turned into a sociopathic businessman with a god complex. When Bond and his ally Jinx investigate him, Graves captures both of them, torturing Bond with electricity and trying to force him to watch as Jinx is cut in half with a laser. Graves reveals that he plans to use his laser satellite Icarus to destroy the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea so the North can conquer the South. When Bond and Jinx escape, Graves recklessly fires Icarus at him, endangering his own men and killing his second-in-command Zao. When Bond confronts him again, Graves tries to electrocute him to death.
  • Hugo Drax is a vile businessman who sees most of humanity as a pestilence to be eradicated. Drax has developed a deadly nerve agent which he intends to release onto the Earth to wipe out all human life while he and his personally chosen "super race" wait in the Moonraker space station to repopulate the Earth. When Bond and CIA Agent Holly Goodhead try to stop him, Drax locks them in the blast chamber beneath his rocket to be incinerated. Later, Drax attempts to have his henchman Jaws kill them, all while planning to eliminate Jaws for not fitting into his perfect world.
• Continuity Lockout:
  • A large number of the missions begin midway through their respective film's plot, and it's clear that the developers expected that players would be very familiar with all of the source material. If you haven't seen the films, you'll likely be confused as to the parade of supporting characters coming in and out of missions, why the plot bounces around from locale to locale without any connecting threads (for instance, going from Die Another Day to Moonraker), and how the game actually fits into continuity. (It was later rendered completely non-canon by Spectre.)
  • In Skyfall, Bond chases Patrice because he stole a list of covert MI6 operatives in Istanbul. In the DLC, Bond chases Patrice after learning he killed two agents, still gets shot off the train after M has a dilemma, and then somehow tracks him all the way to Shanghai with no explanation whatsoever (unlike the film, where Bond uses a depleted uranium bullet to find out more about him).
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • The Skyfall DLC. Aside from the fact that it wasn't ready for the game's release (necessitating that it be distributed later as a free DLC), the mission is a clipped adaptation of the plot from the associated film. The first stage was seemingly the original opening level for the game, pushed to the end of the game instead and having no context for how it followed on from the previous mission (Moonraker). Get past moments of slipped accents, dodgy programming (head-on car crashes are a minor inconvenience, NPCs are yanked out of the way like they're on a rope when you drive past) and a Cutscene Boss battle where you simply beat the hell out of Patrice, the second part of the DLC is a short, unsatisfying affair. You run around in a small arena and pump as many rounds as possible into Patrice, who is a bullet sponge. When you finally defeat him, the game ends with a short cutscene that provides No Ending (Bond simply accepts that M had to make the call to shoot him, then is told to wait for a phone call). That's not mentioning that the music for this DLC is pulled from Blood Stone (specifically, the Siberian car chase and hovercraft chase tracks).
  • The core game inverts this. In an overall disappointing game the final Moonraker level is generally considered the best of the bunch by far. The set design is good. There is a stealth section that actually works reasonably well. The space station sequence especially stands out by introducing fighting in zero gravity and even venturing outside into open vacuum. And for a change the boss fight is not just a glorified quick-time event. Little wonder they saved it for last.
• Magnificent Bastard: Franz Sanchez is a powerful drug lord who lacks his film incarnation’s needless cruelty while maintaining his charm and intelligence. Sanchez runs a criminal organization that spans the globe, having his hand in money laundering in Asia, and the theft of American weapons in the Middle East. Sanchez has developed a way of smuggling his cocaine into the US by mixing it in with gasoline, a strategy that has kept the DEA from catching him. Sanchez has also partnered himself with terrorists who he smuggles into the US by having them drive his gasoline trucks. When he discovers that the CIA is trying to infiltrate his organization, Sanchez attacks and nearly kills Felix Leiter. When CIA Agent Pam Bouvier infiltrates his base, Sanchez uncovers her true intentions and nearly kills her, only being stopped by Bond’s interference.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Hoo boy. Originally intended to coincide with the franchise's 50th anniversary, it was instead derided by gaming news outlets and players along for being archaic, buggy and filled with wasted plotlines. Not to mention that it doesn't give any opportunity to honor some of the long-time participants involved with the series.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The PC version of 007 Legends is locked to 1280x720 resolution; changing the resolution just upscales it, the internal render is always at 720p. This is a huge no-no in PC gaming (the first Dark Souls and Deadly Premonition are also infamous for doing the same thing) because 720p visuals are glaringly blurry and low-fidelity on modern PC monitors. The game also has extreme mouse acceleration as well as a mouse deadzone, neither of which can be disabled, which makes aiming feel like the game is emulating a controller instead of a true responsive mouse input. It's something of a moot point, seeing how little circulation the PC version of the game received due to being pulled from all stores after only a couple of months.
  • The Wii U version is the only version of the game that can still play the Skyfall DLC if you didn't buy it on another platform. Unfortunately it has horrendous performance issues, running at a lower frame rate and serious sensitivity issues.
• Tear Jerker: For all the problems people have with the game, Tracy's death isn't one of them. The faster pace, the music, M's speech from Casino Royale (2006) playing over the scene and also the fact that Tracy appears to still be alive for a few seconds after the bullets hit her make for a very effective scene.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Timothy Watson voicing Bond instead of Daniel Craig. Whereas Craig's performances in Blood Stone and Goldeneye Wii were largely praised, Watson's performance was criticized for sounding bored and disaffected throughout the game.
  • On the one hand, the flashback missions are modernized and updated to the Craig era. This was not seen as a bad thing in itself, but many were hoping for the first Bond game to feature all the actors for the anniversary, perhaps even as individual Period Piece levels. But then on the other hand, they modernized all the featured movies' stories without regard for the continuity or tone of the rebooted Craig era (unlike Goldeneye Wii and Blood Stone), such as Jeffrey Wright's Felix Leiter or QUANTUM. And then, they wasted a great storytelling opportunity by not integrating the vignettes into some kind of overarching plot, meaning they pleased nobody.
  • The move to make the game more of a Call of Duty-clone was roundly criticized at launch, not only because the developers programmed in a poorly-utilized stealth system, but also because all of the engine upgrades that were present in GoldenEyeWii were seemingly thrown out the window.
  • The WiiU version not having Wii Remote and Nunchuk support, whereas GoldenEye did.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite having access to 50 years' worth of characters, setpieces and storylines (to say nothing of the fact that several actors from the films return to voice their roles, including Michael Lonsdale, Carey Lowell and Judi Dench), the game offers very short vignettes from the films that don't bother to expand on their respective storylines or do anything interesting or extensive with the classic characters. Lowell shows up to voice Pam Bouvier (Licence to Kill) again, but she's entirely relegated to being a Voice with an Internet Connection, while Lonsdale (Hugo Drax) is a Cutscene Boss who's only heard over loudspeaker through the majority of the mission.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Although Skyfall's storyline was generally well-received critically, the game instead offers a clipped adaptation that just ends when Bond kills Patrice, and seems to be an indicator that the development team either received a truncated version of the film's storyline from the production team, or they just didn't want to bother with a game that dealt with Raoul Silva and the Skyfall estate.
  • An entire game with levels that span the first fifty years of the James Bond movie franchise could have been the perfect opportunity for all six of the actors that officially played James Bond up to that point to get together and give Sean Connery through Roger Moore one last crack at the character while they were all still alive. Instead, the game is made into a big ego trip for Daniel Craig's Bond (who isn't even voiced by Daniel Craig himself), and any chance of all the Bond actors coming together for any sort of occasion is lost forever, as of Roger Moore's passing in 2017 and Sean Connery's in 2020.

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