From Russia with Love is a transparently greedy exercise in corporate boardroom game design. If there were any justice at all it would not get any stars and you would not be reading this review. It is profoundly unchallenging. It is crammed to bursting with unsubtle and gooey boomer nostalgia. It is dumber than broccoli (the vegetable, not the producer).

But. It is actually a lot of fun to play. And as you play, you will find yourself feeling just the same way you feel when you are watching a James Bond movie. You will note that rarely, if ever, has your intelligence suffered such an insult. And then you will tell your intelligence to quit being such a crybaby and enjoy the ride.

The game is set somewhere in the 1963 film of the same name, although it fiddles absent-mindedly with the plot and introduces new characters (read: Bond Girls) whenever it feels like it. But the anchor of it all remains Bond himself, played once again by Sean Connery.

Connery must be loving this video game voice-over stuff. He gets to hang out in a comfy recording booth and ham it up with lines about about shaken-not-stirred martinis and BondJamesBond. He gets to act like an old man, in other words, sitting in a chair and babbling about the good old days, while on the screen a digital stand-in, all 1963 skintone and jawline and belt size, does the stunts and keeps the dinner jacket looking freshly pressed. He gets to act like an old man and and still believe, deep down in his heart, that he is cool. He is to be envied, Sean Connery.

Sadly, the digital stand-in is much better as a mannequin than as an actor. His lips bubble and flap when Connery speaks, but the timing is off and the mouth-shapes are all wrong, which is both distracting and technically unimpressive. Surely, on a game with a budget large enough to include hiring Sean Connery back into the Bond role, there ought to have been enough cash rolling around to pay for a lip-synch animator or two.

But never mind the flapping lips, you're saying, what about the game? How does it play? It plays like a James Bond movie, which is to say that it basically steers itself. You are nominally in charge, and as you tilt the little joystick forward the digital Connery stand-in runs forward, and as you push the shoot button the digital Connery stand-in raises his gun and fires off a round. But as you play, you will find it tough to shake the feeling that, if you set the controller down on the couch, the action would carry on just fine without you. This game is easy. Holy cow is it easy. If you are wobbly on shaken-not-stirred martinis, you will find it easy. If you have only played a video game once before in your life, and that was in 1974 on a Pong machine in your university bar, you will have no trouble ripping through it.

The bad guys shoot at you, and you don't take cover, and the little bar graph that measures your health shrinks a bit, but you still run like a horse, and you still aim like a laser, and your little pistol still has no trouble stopping hordes of body-armour-wearing thugs, even when those thugs are firing machine guns at you. It is a game you can win when you're barely paying attention.

A game this easy is ordinarily a bore. Here, maybe because of Connery, or maybe because of the music, it's not. It's a fun thing to watch out of the corner of your eye while you're doing something else. It would go well with a round of Trivial Pursuit.