Casino Royale

Earlier this year, the press had a field day with new Bond actor Daniel Craig. They said he was too wimpy, too blond, and too rubbish at driving – and this was before he turned up at a press conference on a speedboat wearing a big, girly lifejacket. Tsk!

However, next to the animated Bond in Sony Pictures' Casino Royale mobile game, Craig looks like an all-guns-blazing action hero. In this game, Bond doesn't run: he galumphs, like a cross between John Cleese doing a silly walk and some B-movie vampire. His animation ain't great, in other words.

But it'd be a shame if that put you off playing Casino Royale, as it's a polished – if derivative – spy platformer, with some neat touches.

Derivative? Well, yes. It's basically Gameloft's Splinter Cell series with Bond slapped on.

As Bond, you bound between platforms, sneak up behind enemies, collect weapons, and defuse the odd bomb. And considering the excellence of the recently released Splinter Cell: Double Agent, this game's got a fight on its hands, although the Bond brand will attract many more casual gamers.

Casino Royale follows the plot of the new movie, set in and around the Le Casino Royale casino, and featuring cameos from the film's key characters such as terrorist banker Le Chiffre and sexpot agent Vesper Lynd. 'M' pops up every so often to give you new instructions too. The presentation is good, hammering home the fact that this is an official Bond game.

The gameplay isn't bad either. Strange animation aside, it's a slick platformer with simple controls, which are introduced via an in-game tutorial. You can run around, jump and pull yourself up onto plaforms, shimmy up and down poles, swing on ropes and roll along the ground in true action hero style.

Meanwhile, you can either shoot enemies when you encounter them – you pick up new guns as you progress – or get close in for some fisticuffs. Biff them a few times, and some icons appear on-screen showing a button combination (for example, 'left', 'right', 'fire') that lets you finish them with a special move.

A slightly tweaked version of the same icon system is used when you're trying to pick locks or defuse bombs, and it works well too.

There's also an indicator that tells you when you can make a 'Bond move', which involves pressing your handset's left soft-key. This is used for sneak attacks from behind, but also other things like rope-swinging, and kicking bins at crowds of enemies.

A neat touch is the inclusion of character upgrading between levels. If you make it through without dying, you'll be given skill points to assign to your shooting, brawling, armour and stealth ratings, which correspondingly affect the gameplay.

The levels themselves are fairly short and – dare we say it – a bit on the easy side, but that's no surprise from a game aimed more at Bond fans who might not be dedicated gamers.

So far so good. We whipped through the first 13 levels in a couple of hours of play, and enjoyed it. We did get stuck on level 14 for a while, but the problem turned out to be us forgetting how to use the sniper rifle properly to shoot out a security panel, rather than a dodgy bug.

In summary then, Casino Royale is a polished and enjoyable platformer, which although not entirely original, is a darn sight better than 90% of movie games.