The Spy Who Shot Me Switch Review

My dad and I have a bit of a tradition when it comes to James Bond films where we go see it together or we don’t see it at all. We used to watch the Channel 7 double feature Bond films, and I was hooked from the start. There’s no denying that Connery left his mark, but Craig evolved the character into something new altogether. The Spy Who Shot Me is more focused on being a comedy parody of Connery’s Bond. What’s it Like? Grab a Martini, some cuff links, and practice some one-liners as we review “The Spy Who Shot Me.”

Right off the bat, I was going to walk right past this one as the Eshop art is terrible, honestly, the worst E-shop thumbnail. This doesn’t affect the score, but more a life lesson for me about why you shouldn’t judge a game by its cover I suppose.

The Spy Who Shot Me is a parody shooter that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s full of cheesy dialogue, terrible voice acting, and even worse one-liners… but not in a bad way, just in a classic Bond way. It’s an old-school feeling retro 1st person shooter that reminds me so much of Medal of Honor 1 on PS1, right down to hit detection on the bad guys. It’s a camp story following Agent 7 who works for MI-69, an international spy agency, who must track down the evil entity, SCUM, and stop them from using Nuclear missiles.

The gameplay revolves around shooting bad guys who mainly just walk toward you blindly swinging melee weapons. The AI is a bit disappointing, and the game pokes fun at itself there too. There are ranged enemies, who are lethally accurate, similar to snipers in games that give you a certain time period to duck and cover before decimating you. There’s not much variety in enemies, so my experience wore thin fairly early on but I was spurred on by the silly humor and story missions. The missions will take you around the world, skydiving, boating, and walking around a variety of environments which tend to be rather bland. You shoot bad guys, find a floating “7” that acts as an action, opening a door everywhere, or have you guard an objective until your time expires. There are some “Open World” sections too, offering side missions that are equally as silly as the game, racing boats around a harbour, or clearing frog men off a golf course.

The art direction is a tribute to the PS1 era of games, with low poly models and pixelated textures to complement them. Weapons have variety and it’s fun to find a new gun to use in the level. Frustratingly, I found picking up ammo for a certain weapon type automatically switches to that weapon, sometimes throwing me off and losing the edge in a gunfight. Another thing that seems to work against you is the aiming acceleration being very aggressive. There are times when you can expertly drop enemies in succession and other times when you can’t even target center mass due to the controls going wild.

Despite these issues, the game is still a blast to play… for a while in my case anyway. You can knock the entire game over in about 3 hours, so for the price of a movie ticket, you are entertained for as long as one. There are records to beat and secrets to uncover, possibly padding that time out to about 5 hours, but after that, there’s not much to do to keep you coming back. I liked the humour and how it subverted expectations by parodying itself at times, but when that shine wears off there’s just not a lot of game to go back to.

I had fun with my time playing it, but to be honest, I don’t really have a desire to go back and better my times or discover the secrets I missed. It’s not a bad game in any sense, and completionists may have a lot of fun combing through the game. I view it like watching a film, enjoying it for a nice distraction from the other games on my content schedule, letting me just cruise through the experience. Ultimately The Spy Who Shot Me is like a classic Bond Film in a sense, it may not look the best, but it’s fun, enjoyable, and a little bit cheesy. I’m glad The Spy Who Shot me didn’t leave me shaken, but unfortunately, it didn’t really stir me either.

So What’s it Like?

Like Classic Connery, crossed with Medal of Honor for the PS1.

I award it a 64/100.