Goldeneye 007 is one of the primary reasons I had a Nintendo 64 rather than a Playstation in the mid '90s (in retrospect this is probably a bad call). I had grown up playing the occasional FPS on PCs, especially Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D, but mostly stuck with console games, as I always had very dated computers, and I generally enjoyed playing platformers and sports games more, genres which were generally better on consoles. My general distaste for FPS remains to this day, although there are definitely standout titles I enjoyed a lot, and still do. But one of the best things about the FPS is multiplayer, and the games that generally hold a lot of appeal for me in this genre are ones I was able to enjoy with friends, and among these, none stands out more in my memory than Goldeneye 007.
It was such a multiplayer experience to me that up until this weekend I had never even beaten the campaign! And it's definitely true that the real selling point of the game is in it's multiplayer, and it's really what separates the game from its PC peers. Technically speaking, it's hard to argue that Goldeneye 007 represents a superior experience in terms of gameplay to a game like Doom or Doom II. The mouse and keyboard combination makes for a much more precise and user friendly control scheme than does the single stick autoaim of Goldeneye 007. Was it possible to play Quake or Doom online in 1995? Definitely! Was it possible to play those game on LAN with your friends? Absolutely! Was it easy, convenient, or affordable to do so? Not even close!
Goldeneye 007 represented the first time that four people could play shooters together without thousands of dollars of equipment (go look at the price of a PC that could play Doom back then, and then multiply that price by how many people you wanted to play, LAN cables, mice and keyboards, monitors...) or still unreliable and laggy internet. With Goldeneye 007, you could have an excellent multiplayer experience with four people for probably less than $400, which included the console, game, and controllers. The frame rate was excellent for the time, given that they were outputting 4 players at once. The controls were good enough. The music was superb. The graphics were clear enough, even on small cubes of the screen, to tell what you were doing. The game modes were seemingly endless. The maps were iconic and provided for a wide range of strategies and playstyles. There were a huge number of weapons to pick from. If you like FPS, you almost certainly have very positive experiences with Goldeneye 007, unless you were an extremely entitled and spoiled rich 90s kid with the internet and top of the line computing power in your house. Would you put up with it now? Definitely not. But it's a true trailblazer, and deserves probably even more credit than it traditionally gets for laying the tracks to the next generation of multiplayer console FPS as exemplified by Halo. And the game was launched much earlier than people think, coming before even Quake and well before Unreal Tournament and Half-Life, which were the ultimate content inspiration for the modern shooters like Halo.
But this review is ultimately about my first real tangle with the single player campaign of the game, with the assumption that the multiplayer is an all time classic, and worthy of a near 10 score. I was actually really impressed! I bought into the narrative that Goldeneye 007 is unplayable after the release of Halo, but I didn't find that to be true upon experiencing it for myself. It definitely doesn't shine quite as brightly as it did in 1995, but that could be said for almost any game from that awkward era of transition from 2D to 3D.
The missions are really big and impressive, with a ton of different things to do in each. Having grown up playing the formulaic approach established by Wolfenstein 3D, in which you must cut through enemies, grab key cards to unlock doors, beat a boss, rinse, and repeat, Goldeneye 007 was a really fresh approach at the time. The game isn't just about getting the end of a hallway or navigating a maze. You must consider the innocent civilians in your level, destroy certain strategically important objectives along the way, meet up with characters and have discussions, and use your fancy secret agent gadgets to James Bond your way to victory. There are a ton of missions, and all are very bite sized and encourage you to experiment with the best paths along your route in order to find the best equipment and locate all of the objectives. The levels feel like real buildings, rather than linear stages. There are tons of rooms in which there is nothing to accomplish, and you'll frequently have to go out of your way to find where to go.
Each mission also has multiple difficulty levels, which adds more and more objectives to your tasks, as well as increases the challenge of killing all of the enemies contained within. Completing these higher difficulty levels will reward you with special cheats that can be used in multiplayer mode, encouraging you to push yourself to accomplish bigger and better things.
The visuals are actually quite good for the time. There's plenty of awkward looking characters and textures, but you can basically determine what everything is, and a lot of the design is taken from the film, which is a nice touch.
The controls are far better than I expected, with a generous auto aim feature that allows you to continue to maneuver while aiming/shooting. Sometimes you'll get "stuck" pulling towards a target in which you're not interested in shooting at the moment, but it works pretty well if you can get your reticle in the ball park. The C-Buttons also work reasonably well as a second analog stick, and I found myself using them quite a bit in times where precision shooting was required.
The game has a delightful level of detail and love obviously poured into it. Shooting an enemy in the hand or arm can result in them dropping their gun, while shooting their foot will cause them to fall over. Getting in elevators replaces the intense James Bond themed music with cheesy elevator music, which always makes me smile. Gunshots leave marks on the walls, and cause all sorts of zany sound effects depending on where they're shot.
The game has definitely got it's quirks and problems, but some of them are now more funny and charming than problematic. The AI can be extremely stupid, making it so that the enemy can't really shoot you if you're standing right in front of them. They'll also do this incredibly dumb sideways roll technique, and if you kill them during the roll, they'll finish the roll, stand up, and then die! On the other hand, there are also examples of when the AI is pretty good, such as when the soldiers will run back to trigger alarms to signal other soldiers upon sight of you.
The missions can be a bit too open and fluid for the player, necessitating multiple playthroughs of missions to get it right. For example, one mission asks you to destroy a satellite, but there are multiple objects throughout the mission that look like they might be satellites! There's also little annoying things in missions that basically demand that you lose at least once. In one mission, Boris shows up and talks to you, but then pulls a gun on you. Your natural response is to shoot, until you see that he fumbles his gun, and then your partner will no longer help you anymore due to killing Boris. In another mission, you partner gets kidnapped by bad guys, and if you go in shooting to try to save her, they'll kill her every time.
All in all, I really enjoyed playing through the game's single player mission, and the game remains a true light year jump forward for multiplayer console gaming, along with it's N64 peers Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros., Mario Party, and Perfect Dark. Long live couch multiplayer! I'll give the game a 9.4/10.
I need to replay a few old favorites for spiritual reasons before I get to another review, but I'm still working on Mass Effect 3, and my next retro console review will be for this game:
-TRO
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