James Bond is back to settle the score in Quantum of Solace: The Game. Introducing a more lethal and cunningly efficient Bond, the game blends intense first-person action with a unique third-person cover combat system that allows players to truly feel what it is like to be the ultimate secret agent as they use their stealth, precision shooting and lethal combat skills to progress through missions. Seamlessly blending the heart-pounding action and excitement of the upcoming "Quantum of Solace" feature film with the "Casino Royale" movie, the title propels players into the cinematic experience of international espionage. Based on the renowned Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare game engine that has been specifically engineered to immerse players in the Bond universe, Quantum of Solace: The Game delivers superior high-definition graphics, reactive AI and visually stunning locations inspired by locales portrayed in the films.

Quantum of Solace marks the first game appearance of Daniel Craig's Bond and, although it's named after the latest film, it will cover the previous film, Casino Royale, as well as Solace. Covering both movies actually works out, given that Solace is a proper sequel to Casino Royale and picks up roughly an hour after the events in that film. Treyarch is taking a pretty standard action approach to the game, in that you'll be running Bond through his paces across various set pieces from the films that will have you spying, fighting, and shooting. Unfortunately for hardcore fans, Treyarch hasn't included a "bedding the ladies" component, which keeps Quantum from being the definitive Bond experience, but there's always the next game.

Our demo of the game broke down into looks at three different levels, all taken from the Casino Royale portion. The first demo was set during the latter part of the film, in which Bond chases his current special lady Vesper into a house on the canals of Venice. For the purposes of the game, Treyarch has taken some dramatic license and dropped into the house a whole bunch of foes who will stand between you and Vesper as she rides an elevator up to the higher levels. Your goal is obviously to follow her, dealing with the opposition in one of two ways: stealthily taking them out when possible or shooting them full of bullets. The demo of the level showed a pretty logical assortment of spots in the house where one method worked better than the other, which kept the action varied. The other element to the sequence involved making your way through the house environment, which, in typical dramatic Bond fashion, was beginning to sink into the water.

The second level that we saw was taken from a bit earlier in the game and was set in the casino that serves as the film's centerpiece. Bond's task is to shadow and protect main baddie Le Chiffre from assorted goons who would like to kill him. Bond receives direction via an earpiece as he navigates the guard-filled halls of the casino. The level skewed a bit more toward the stealth side of things; the initial demo level found our demonstrator attempting to tear through the halls on a shooting spree that got him smacked down pretty quickly. His second attempt to go through the level was much stealthier and saw him avoiding guards and even taking to the exterior of the building via windows to make his way to different areas. The exterior route also let Bond do some eavesdropping to get some useful information.