Goldeneye 007 was a landmark game for me in my youth. It’s home for me. I have a similar affection for its follow-up, Perfect Dark. In fact, I’m not sure I could accurately estimate which I played more. But since Goldeneye was first, I put more importance on it.

I sometimes ponder on the fact that Goldeneye’s formula didn’t have the same wide impact as Doom, Half-Life, or Halo. That’s not to say it didn’t spawn pretenders, but the pretenders took all the wrong lessons. Goldeneye’s objective-based mission design would be applied to strictly linear environments that were all to afraid to let the player miss something. Perhaps it’s the fact that the stealth-leaning gameplay didn’t fit with the genre’s roots in fast action. That’s not to say no game successfully adopted a similar formula – the recent Hitman games, for example – but I think it’s fair to say that there’s still nothing quite like Goldeneye. 

Except Perfect Dark. Or maybe Timesplitters 2. I think some of the EA Bond games tried to replicate it, but, from what I recall, they weren’t quite successful. Still, nothing hit quite the same.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die seeks to rectify this by adhering so closely to Goldeneye that it’s practically wearing its skin. However, I don’t feel like it’s convinced me to revise my previous statement. There’s still nothing quite like Goldeneye. Except Perfect Dark.

INGENIOUS ISN’T IT MR. BONT?

Agent 64: Spies Never Die tries to emulate Goldeneye right down to the graphical style. Well, aside from the significant N64 blur. Characters are blocky and essentially have portraits pasted on their faces. Textures are smudged in most places, and, really, it’s mostly convincing. The lighting is more modern, and it has some of Perfect Dark’s added effects, but it clearly leans toward Goldeneye as its main source of inspiration.

You play as some… guy. John… something. I’m not good with names. He’s old and has had a lot of action-packed adventures. I think he’s supposed to be interpreted as an older, legally distinct version of Goldeneye Bond, and he has a daughter who isn’t strictly similar but not entirely dissimilar from Joanna Dark. Anyway, he’s under attack by a pompous douche who looks awfully healthy for a dead guy. The douche steals the amulet of Agent 64’s dead wife.

Overall, the narrative isn’t that deep. In fact, there’s no expository dossier between levels. Or at least, there wasn’t in the build I played. I think the lack of dossiers have the biggest effect, since Goldeneye didn’t really tell much in gameplay, but I’m also not sure who, narratively, would be briefing John 64. Could be diary entries, I guess. Anyway, it isn’t a big deal.

NO ODDJOB

I played the demo for Agent 64: Spies Never Die a few years back. It didn’t click with me, but when I started into the release build, I couldn’t remember why. Additionally, it was, as I’ve said, years ago. Things would have changed throughout development, so I cast off those old impressions and went in with a completely open mind.

A couple of levels in, I could easily recall exactly what I didn’t like about the demo.

Let me be clear with one thing first: Agent 64 does a great job replicating the feel of Goldeneye. The bizarre aiming system of the N64 classic translates to PC rather convincingly, and the gliding-feel of the movement is here as well. Enemies react to getting shot in different parts of their anatomy, just like in Goldeneye, which, in itself, was borrowed from Time Crisis. The enemies even have the same hurt grunts and yelps. I’m guessing that they’re from an old sound pack that the developer, Replicant D6, was able to locate. That or they’re just convincingly replicated. If you love Goldeneye, it will make you feel at comfortable.

But what blew the demo for me and is still the same in the final version is the level design. I cannot possibly overstate how much Agent 64’s level design drags down the whole experience. 

00 AGENT

A lot of early 3D games toyed with the idea of realistic space. Developers quickly learned that there was more to level design than mimicking the real world, so you can sometimes see a bit of struggle to find a balance.

Goldeneye has some of that struggle. Rare was able to create an impressive amount of flow to their levels, but the whole thing gets a bit wobbly when their mission structure comes into play. Certain objectives become unclear, important objects get lost in the map design, and between pointless areas and the need for backtracking, finding your way around can be frustrating. The difficulty system, which adds additional objectives to higher difficulties, makes this a bit easier, as Agent is straightforward and 00 Agent can become more perplexing.

Take St. Petersburg Streets, for example, where you have to pull your tank over to an otherwise nondescript alley to talk to someone on medium and hard.

But it also made Goldeneye unique. A lot of the levels were really open. You could sneak around, you could poke at the margins, you could learn the best route. Places felt somewhat real, and there was a lot of variety. And even when levels were more linear, there were usually ways to sneak through them without things devolving into a massive gunfight.

Agent 64 doesn’t have that. The levels are almost invariably linear and they don’t feel believable. A lot of them are just corridors, and few of them allow for stealth. They all feel severely artificial, and it’s all just a huge bummer. And this isn’t just to say that this isn’t Goldeneye, it’s more that the level design is just majorly drab. The design feels very spartan, and, from an aesthetic standpoint, the levels are very uneven, which undercuts a lot of the experience. Outside a few levels, the whole focus seems to have been put on action, which isn’t what the controls really excel at.

SILENCED PP7

One of the worst divergences is the loss of stealth. To be fair, stealth can be annoying, especially in first-person shooters but Goldeneye never made it a complete fail state. Usually, tripping an alarm just meant that enemies would constantly spawn, greatly complicating your efforts to complete objectives. It incentivized taking it slow and learning patrol routes so you could get through without alerting the building.

Agent 64 has silenced weapons, but the way sound works in it mystifies me. I think that silencers reduce the likelihood of alerting nearby guards, but it’s so ambiguous that it’s not a confident statement. Blasting away with an unsilenced fully automatic won’t alert enemies over a short distance, so the advantage of a silencer is questionable. I also feel that the sound is calculated from where the bullet landed, rather than where it was shot from. Killing a guard with a silenced headshot from far away shouldn’t alert a wall-gazing guard five feet away. In reality, sure it would, but not within the game’s logic.

A CLONE OF OUR OWN

These deficiencies could be explained by suggesting that Agent 64 is more concerned with its multiplayer component. If that’s true, it’s a bummer. However, I’ll willingly concede that the level design works better in a multiplayer context. They make for better arenas, certainly, each providing different opportunities. In the time I spent in the multiplayer side, I found the levels to be agreeable.

The multiplayer is also supported by a large variety of modes and modifiers, and it does feel remarkably like Goldeneye did, though with support for more players and, you know, online.

It’s possible that if you go into Agent 64 with the primary intention of reliving the old days (with maybe less screen-looking) of multiplayer, you might have a good time. I just have difficulty speaking to that, since it isn’t my focus.

MAN WITH THE PYRITE GUN

The music is also good, and fits with the goal of emulating the swagger of Goldeneye. So, you could largely just boil down my complaints straight to singleplayer level design and very little else.

But that is a major complaint. The lack of attention to singleplayer maps utterly kneecapped the experience for me. Worse than being a simple disappointment, I just couldn’t enjoy myself for large swaths of the experience. It’s just so weak.

Agent 64 is successful in replicating a lot of the look, feel, and swagger of Goldeneye, but when it comes to putting it into practice, at least when it comes to singleplayer, it doesn’t come close. And for me, the fact that the actual mission design falls so short made all of its successes feel superficial, even if, on paper, it succeeds more than it fails. You can take from that what you want. Maybe if multiplayer is what you’re showing up for, it will scratch the itch. I’d rather just disavow any knowledge of Agent 64.

5/10

This review was conducted using a pre-release Steam version of the game. It was provided by the developer’s PR.