007: Licence to Drive

Original Release: 2011
Developer: Gamelion
Publisher: Glu Mobile
Platform: Java Mobile

By 2011, the smartphone ere of mobile phones was in full swing, so it’s surprising that a Java-only licensed James Bond games was made at the time, developed by Gamelion with the name “License to Drive”.

While the name is obviously supposed to be based on the phrase “Licence to Kill”, it really doesn’t work well, it just sounds like a driving lesson app. That said, a driving lesson app would probably be a more entertaining game than this.

This is a vertical scrolling driving game where you’ll be shooting enemies as you head to the end of a level. You’ll drive a few different vehicles, but other than the size, they’re all the same. You can fire weapons forwards and drop gadgets behind you. There are powerups on the track to give you different weapons, although these are usually more difficult to use than the standard weapons. In some levels, your weapons will be constantly changing as you accidentally collect power ups while battling enemies.

One power up is a lock-on anti-air missile. This is the only way to attack helicopters. However, the lock-on doesn’t even work, and your missiles waggle from side to side as they move up the screen, so will often miss and it’s down to pure luck. Combined with the annoyances of losing this item if you drive over another, fighting helicopters are extremely frustrating.

The healthbar makes no sense to me, parts change colours at different times. I did have to go out of my way to kill Bond to see if it was actually working, and other than resetting your score, there’s no actual punishment for dying, especially as you definitely wouldn’t want to play again to get a high score, the game is just mind-numbingly dull.

Most of the levels consist of two types: get to the end of a level or kill a certain amount of enemies and then get to the end of a level. When you have to take out enemies, sections of the level will repeat until you kill enough – although the levels feel randomly generated so you might not notice. The penultimate mission is the only one that’s different, you have to defend a truck containing a bomb. This is magnitudes more difficult than any other mission in the game.

There is a story to this game: Bond is investigating crime, someone that fishes for crabs is a secret weapons dealer that “never left Vietnam”, so to stop him you drive though multiple locations causing chaos (and killing lots of local police) and having to beat the CIA to him (because for some reason they won’t work with MI6 for international issues) so that he can’t start a war between India and Pakistan and sell weapons to both. The dialogue is extremely poor and uninteresting.

Licence to Drive is a terrible game, the controls are wonky, the gameplay is both dull and tedious and I don’t think I can come up with anything positive about this one.