GoldenEye: Rogue Agent

"Bond Nostalgia is about the only thing that keeps this game intact."

Almost eight years ago, Rare created a little game for the N64 based on the 1995 James Bond film, Goldeneye. The game turned out to be more than little, but it ended being huge. Not only was the game a huge financial success for Rare and Nintendo, but the game was impressive. With average graphics, but fluid motion; superb music, but questionable grunts and whiffs; and a loose story line, the Single-Player mode was a great experience that changed First-Person shooters forever.

Instead of the same old run n gun till ya die philosophy, Rare made the game mission-based, while still keeping the good old action elements intact. Ok, so the first-person genre wasn t revolutionized because of the single-player, but its multiplayer capabilities definitely revolutionized Friday-night sleepovers.

With a multiplicity of modes, options, weapons, levels, and characters to use, the multiplayer modes in Goldeneye we re, in my mind, the best on any console until TimeSplitters 2.

So its 2004, and EA now has the rights to the James Bond license, and they have decided to use the goldeneye name, but totally changing everything that made Goldeneye s story so fun to play.

Story

The story is complete and utter crap. You play a former 00-agent that loses his 00 status because of an injury that was only made possible by 007. Your eye basically got blasted off. Goldfinger offers you a job at his enterprise and your job is to be his main agent against Dr. No s rival evil-doings.

As you play you will run across several old Bond villains, but the story does not incorporate them very well. Ok, so you will work with Pussy Galore; so what? Others, like Scaramanga, Dr. No, and Goldfinger simply don t add any rich character to the story.

Gameplay

While dual-wielding weapons sounds like a great addition to the game, its really not. The dual-wielding make the control set-up extremely skewed and very odd. You will end up shooting the gun on your left with L, and the gun on your right with R; which basically says good-bye to using L to lock-on or aim. You can t even cycle thru weapons because you can t have more than one weapon in one hand. You have to drop a weapon to pick-up another one. The actual character movement is fine and just like any other first-person shooter. But the overall set-up ruins the experience greatly.

There is also no real aiming cursor to use, so you ll end up trying to aim manually; which is a real pain to use when firing a pistol. Machine guns are most easy to use because they can pretty much demolish every object in a room with one clip. Instead of using classic Goldeneye elements, EA opted to use horrible rapid-fire elements to bust through each area of a mission.

Speaking of missions The game is set through several locations that each have their own missions and directives. Most of these simply involve you, the rogue agent to walk into every room and shoot every person you see. This gets extremely repetitive and dull after the first few rooms. The missions are pretty easy to beat on the easy and medium settings, but on hard, the enemies do a little more work to kill you. If the game wasn t so dull, the hard mode would be worth playing again.

Your blown off eye has been replaced with a synthetic GoldenEye that has special abilities. Francisco Scaramanga, another Bond villain, will upgrade your eye as you progress. You ll rarely use the thing except when required to, otherwise it s just another wasted feature.

In the multiplayer department, there is much more to do and play, but since it utilizes the control set up from the main game, playing with friends can be a frustrating mess. There are still enough modes and levels to tide you and your friends over for a good amount of time, granted that they get used to the messy dual-wielding.

The PS2 and XBOX versions feature an online component that can be fun, provided that you find people to play against. The game only sold through about 60,000 copies in its first month according to NPD.

Graphics

I was very disappointed when I first played the game, simply because I expected some impressive graphical show from the game, but instead I got a standard shooter. Guns look generic, buildings and textures look simple and bland, and enemies look like strange twins. The only thing that really impressed me was the main character design models. How they recreated Goldfinger s face and build really got me stumped, the same goes with Pussy, Scaramanga, and others.

The framerate doesn t drop too often and the action is pretty smooth, but there is not a whole lot to slow down for. Unlike the hyper-speedy action of TimeSplitters 2 where particles and explosions can happen any second, Goldeneye is simply a shoot your weapon here and there type of game that does not really impress the eyes.

Sound

These days, action games cannot really function without good music and sound. GoldenEye: Rogue Agent finally does something right with its music and in-game sounds. The faster paced music fit s the game well and keeps you playing through the uninteresting story-line. There are some points in the game where the music gets repetitive, but overall it is an enjoyable soundtrack.

Gunfire and enemy sounds are believable enough. Certain guns are quite powerful sounding, but some are dull; at least they all sound good enough to make you believe you are actually using that gun. Enemies grunt or yell when they die and that also sounds good, if not funny sometimes.

Of what voice acting that is actually in the game, I would have to say that it is horrible. Even though all the characters sound like their respective actors/actresses, the dialogue is extremely clich , and the actual acting sounds like something out of a Stephen Seagal movie.

Conclusion

You might end up playing this game for the multiplayer, maybe you wont, but there sure are lots of great multiplayer games out there that beats this one down to the sand. You might not even finish the single-player mode because it is exponentially dull. If you want to try this game out, only try it with your friends; otherwise you might turn your dual-wielded guns on yourself. The single-player experience is horrible, and that s all I really have to say.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/02/05