GoldenEye: Rogue Agent

"A good idea that turned into an insult."

PROS: Cool idea; cool eye powers; a few cool guns

CONS: Long, boring, repetitive missions; awful and unbalanced AI; plot isn't what it was cracked up to be; eye powers really aren't that useful; you have to switch between two disks; insult to Bond fans and the GoldenEye name

It all started when there was a brilliant idea to make a new James Bond game. You'd play as a Bond villain and fight alongside famous bad guys from the franchise. What resulted was the biggest insult to James Bond fans everywhere since the Tomorrow Never Dies game.

You play as an anonymous agent kicked out of MI6 for destructive behavior. In a training exercise (uh, I think it's training... it wasn't very clear) - Auric Goldfinger's Operation Grand Slam, the raid on Fort Knox to steal all of the US gold reserves, you apparently "kill" Bond and wreck the whole 'operation' to stop Goldfinger. You're dismissed and Goldfinger picks you up. The fat guy then tells you that Dr. No is a traitor to his organization, Octopus. It's basically the SPECTRE of the Connery-era Bond movies, but they couldn't even use SPECTRE. Shows you what EON Productions thought of this waste of time. Goldfinger wants you to assassinate Dr. No in order to stop the betrayal. Let's see... I thought I was supposed to be a Bond villain! I wanted to attack the MI6 HQ and take Moneypenny hostage! I wanted to try and assassinate M! I wanted to have a fight with Bond instead of doing his work for him... EA, what were you thinking??

On the positive side, you get the nickname "Goldeneye" because you somehow lost your eye in that "training exercise" and Goldfinger had a special eye installed for you. This eye can see through walls, hack into machinery, and even send enemies flying. You have to use the C-stick to switch between the powers, which kind of sucks. But none of these powers are very useful because most of your enemies are so stupid that you won't need to because you can just kill them really easily (and you can press A instead of hacking into something). The game claims to have "EVIL AI", each time you play being different. It is different every time. The thug will hide behind crate number one once and then behind crate number two the next time. Wow, what a difference. There are also helicopters and tanks in this game which are extremely difficult to kill or pass by. You'll have to deplete half your ammo just to down a whirlybird while trying to not get killed by it. This causes the AI and difficulty to be way unbalanced and can give players a huge headache. It seems unnecessary to have highly difficult enemies in every mission, when you can have actual bosses scattered throughout instead.

And then there are the missions. There are only 8 of them. All of them are identical to one another, although the environments change. None of them are memorable, though. You go in to some area, shoot some thugs, go through a door, shoot some more thugs. There's a helicopter waiting for you sooner or later. You can use the environment to your advantage with your eye powers and blow up barrels, but shooting the vegetables does the trick just as well because they're quite inaccurate. There are no driving missions to speak of- let's see, the first Bond game of this generation, Agent Under Fire, had driving missions and that came out three years before! This first-person shooter would find a nice home on the N64 or the PS1, because the graphics aren't all that great either. And it's a first-person shooter. Let's see, nowadays, first-person shooters aren't as good as third-person shooters, because they keep recycling the same stuff over and over again. At least the Metroid Prime games have some original content. Also, Halo 2 has a great online multiplayer, but does this game? No. There's no online play (well, it is the GameCube...) and what multiplayer we do have pales in comparison to The World is Not Enough for the N64. In fact, you'll have two switch between two disks just to access some multiplayer content and some of the missions, which can get really frustrating. This means switching to replay your favorite mission (which I can't see why you'd have a favorite as all of them are identical) can make you angry.

Back on the plus side, the voice acting here is pretty good- they actually used some of the real actors from the movies, even for Scaramanga (aka The Man with the Golden Gun)- but is a bit unclear in spots. Dual-wielding guns is cool, just like it was in GoldenEye 64, one of the best shooters of all time, but the gun selection isn't what the N64 game had. I WANT MY RCP90!!!! This game insults the name- GoldenEye 64 is still a better, more fun FPS than this game ever will be. With lousy AI, boring missions, and a dumbed-down concept, GoldenEye Rogue Agent gets a 3 out of 10. If only they could've taken this brilliant idea and made it work, we could've been looking at a good game, but we're looking at a horrible excuse for a Bond game. Don't even rent it - wait for Activision to make a new game, that will have no problem topping this mess.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 07/19/06, Updated 01/10/08

Game Release: GoldenEye: Rogue Agent (US, 11/22/04)