GoldenEye 007 (N64)

When GoldenEye 007 released on the Nintendo 64 in 1997, it was a surprise smash hit. It certainly had some things going for it, the talented team at Rare were working on an adaptation of one of the best James Bond films, but that alone doesn’t really account for the fact it sold over 8 million copies and sits as the third best selling game for the console, outclassing even The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in sales. With accessible four player first-person shooting on a console at at time when such things were rare, it rode its multiplayer mode to astronomical heights, and yet I had barely touched it back in its heyday. I played it a little at someone else’s house but barely even remembered the few minutes spent on it, and it wasn’t like it was some specific aversion kept me away from it either. I’ve made sure to see every Bond movie after all, but the game just didn’t find its way into my hands, meaning that I wouldn’t really have much nostalgia painting my perspective on it when I finally picked up the game almost 25 years after release.

There are certainly elements of GoldenEye 007 that show its age. Character models are fairly blocky and have photographs of real people and actors stretched over their head that look rather blurry and strange when viewed from the wrong angles. At the same time, stand in the right spot, and the likeness of someone like Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan will look fairly decent despite his boxy body. These rough character models won’t really harm the play and actually help it in some ways, as headshots do significantly more damage and shooting specific body parts on enemies will cause different reactions that can leave them vulnerable to a good follow-up. Once you’ve gotten used to the appearance of the characters though, you’ll find the game does a fairly good job mapping the events of film to a single player campaign mode. Secret agent James Bond’s primary mission for this adventure is to regain control of the GoldenEye satellite weapon after it has fallen into the hands of a crime syndicate known as Janus, a task that will involve him traveling across the globe to places like Russia and Cuba as well as unique locations like a frigate that’s been hijacked by terrorists and a park full of Soviet era statues. Mid-level cutscenes are often kept to a low, especially since the player is free to accidentally deviate from the script and potentially compromise a mission by shooting an ally or interrupting an important meeting, but pre-mission dossiers from Bond’s superior M and gadget man Q do a good job of establishing stakes and objectives while a flirtatious remark from Moneypenny caps off the business talk with something more in line with the suave reputation of agent 007.

The locations in GoldenEye 007 definitely have a good deal of variety even if some end up reused across missions, this partly coming from the choice of setting or providing unique situations like being able to drive a tank through the streets of St. Petersburg while others benefit from the game’s inspired approach to difficulty. While the difficulty you choose when selecting a mission will impact things like how capable enemy soldiers are when it comes to actually hitting you with their shots, many missions actually become more complex the higher you set the difficulty. For example, the first level, the Dam, originally only requires you to make your exit by bungee jumping off the side, but higher difficulties require you to do things like disable the alarms or utilize a gadget to interact with their computer systems. Even on the simplest difficulty there are levels where you might have a special level of pressure like a ticking clock or a person you need to protect, and admittedly the protection missions are hampered a bit by the weak AI of your companions. Adding these extra goals gives reason to actually check out the higher difficulties though, especially since you can select each mission individually to play and you can earn unlockables for multiplayer by doing so. Some of these goals aren’t the best explained sadly, the game sometimes requiring you to find an item without knowing what it looks like and it might end up manifesting as an unassuming green rectangle somewhere in the level or require you to interact with the right character without knowing that function exists, but one thing that helps the levels avoid being too confusing is that their size is often fairly limited. Much of the challenge comes from figuring out how to approach your objectives while surviving incoming fire, so once you learn what to do, you can likely clear the level fairly quickly on a second attempt, the game even setting par times to try and beat that reward you for such speedy completions.

The campaign does end up in a slightly rough balancing act though. Even though knowing what to do increases how quickly you can approach a second attempt, an instant failure due to a mistake can still sting quite a bit because the goals can involve a harsh punishment if you approach it poorly. It makes some sense though that being sloppy in a hostage situation can lead to a quick failure though, but it certainly feels like those messages from the higher-ups before the mission could have either included more helpful details or some helpful pictures and explanations on what your gadgets do to smooth out the learning process a tad. When you can cleanly complete a mission though, it is quite satisfying because you actually had to perform a series of actions expertly, but at other times you may be bumbling about without any clear idea what to do until you finally stumble across a tiny key you couldn’t really make out due to its coloration and placement.

The somewhat bumpy mission structure of single-player doesn’t totally drag it down, but the splitscreen multiplayer does feel far more polished and it is unsurprisingly GoldenEye 007’s crown jewel. While people going back to the game now will likely find even its wide range of control options not quite in line with how they expect a first-person shooter on console to control, it can be adjusted to and even rereleases like the Switch Online and Xbox ports allow for further control adjustments to make it more comfortable. The only area that can’t really be smoothed over either through practice or modern alternatives is the precise aiming. Usually GoldenEye 007 has you holding your gun up and you just need to open fire, the auto-aim feature helping to push your shots towards where you expect them to go without making them so accurate there’s no challenge involved. If you want to shoot at something specific like when you aim the sniper rifle though, a cursor appears on screen and your movement controls become devoted to moving that cursor around. The issue lies in the fact the cursor tries to pull itself back towards the center if you stop holding the control stick, meaning you’re fighting to line up your shots if you want to be more precise. Rarely is such a thing necessary, this mostly cropping up in single-player where you might want to shoot down an automated turret that doesn’t see you from your hiding spot, so in multiplayer you probably won’t feel the struggle to utilize it because matches are often quick, kinetic, and sometimes surprisingly intense.

Part of this comes from the way health is handled. When you take damage to your health bar, there’s no way to recover, the best hope you have to be finding armor you can equip that serves a bit like a second health bar. Few armor pick-ups exist on a map and most players will quickly learn their placement meaning fights can happen around them and there’s even the interesting touch where you can destroy armor so someone can’t snatch it. This approach to life means that when you encounter another player in the often fairly small maps, you can bet that your shots will do some lasting damage while also knowing your own life is at risk. When you start a life you have no weapons whatsoever as well, meaning you’ll quickly have to search around for what you can grab and thus the adjustable weapon sets can change how a level feels to play. The open spaces of Caves might not fit pistol battles well, but bring grenades to Egyptian and weaving through rooms full of pillars and explosions can make for exciting battles. Library, Basement, and Stack are unfortunately just different pieces of the same level cut up in different ways so that limits the level variety some, but a level like Facility is great because it’s easy to learn where useful items and weapons are so players will be heading between the level’s different areas frequently to ensure the battle’s shape keeps changing based on the environmental options available.

There are definitely some weapons in GoldenEye 007 that can tip the balance towards whoever came across it, something like the RC-P90 an incredibly accurate and strong sub-machine gun, but weapon deficiencies do lead to more diverse standoffs like someone being stuck with the inaccurate Klobb hoping for a hit as they try to weave around enemy fire. The automatic shotgun is positively puny unless you’re so close your screen will probably be filled with your opponent’s face, but a Cougar Magnum will reward you for being more careful as its slow to fire shots do heavy damage if they land. That earlier mentioned auto-aim definitely was partially responsible for much of multiplayer’s thrills, players of various skill levels able to start shooting when they see a target so there’s a good chance they can earn some kills while more skilled and experienced players will better understand when and how a gun should be fired for the best results. Even if everyone just ends up using the same tools, skirmishes are still likely to be quick enough that you feel the pressure of trying to end the opponent early but have the option to possibly retreat and regroup if you can disengage properly. The music that plays during battles can certainly add some more energy to the affair, GoldenEye 007 generally having a good mix of tunes inspired by the Bond films and tracks that match the highs and lows of a spy thriller, sneaking music often still having some tension to it while the conflicts in the open can be almost explosive with their score.

A host of unlockable cheats can allow for amusing additions to multiplayer matches like the bullet holes on walls being replaced with paint splatters that really show how hectic firefights can become, and DK Mode willingly stretches the low fidelity models to intentionally absurd extremes that also make battles even faster as it becomes far easier to land headshots. A few mode variations outside the cheat menu can spice things up though, like The Man with the Golden Gun where one player gets an instant kill golden pistol that earns them a point with each kill but other players can steal if they kill them in turn. The Living Daylights turns matches into competitions to hold onto a flag as long as they can, even kept from using weapons as they instead need to flee in a desperate attempt at survival while everyone else guns for them. Admittedly, GoldenEye 007’s extra modes could benefit from the injection of game-controlled bots or even more than just four players, but technical limitations likely held it back and the these extra options and more eccentric weapon sets like Throwing Daggers give a way to shake up the experience.

THE VERDICT: Smart game design helps GoldenEye 007 maintain its shine even as some gameplay elements are a bit rough in retrospect. The single-player missions don’t always adequately explain your objectives, but figuring out a level’s goals is part of the challenge and the different difficulties vary up the activities to provide more engaging challenges than just a bump to enemy power. The control aren’t always sharp but this is accounted for so that even less-skilled players can enjoy the high octane multiplayer matches. GoldenEye 007 is mostly built around the limitations of its time and still provides satisfying single-player goals and intense splitscreen battles, so even though future game releases refined those systems, GoldenEye 007 still has ideas that can entertain players today.

And so, I give GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64…

A GOOD rating. The single-player missions do sometimes walk a difficult tightrope of not providing enough info but also deriving some of their interesting structure from figuring out your objectives on the fly, and there are definitely some that achieve that balance better than others. The fragile companions feel like a consistent problem whenever it arises, but figuring out the open levels and pushing into unexplored parts in search of your task does have a thrill that might have been lost if you were told exactly where to go and what to do. Being able to pick how hard a specific mission is can alleviate some of this as the goals can be eased up or added to based on what you want out of the stages, and they already have some solid designs and concepts so a level can provide some engaging firefights even if you set the difficulty low. The multiplayer helps GoldenEye 007 from needing to weigh up the individual quality of the story missions though, the splitscreen battles certainly ensuring the game has something to offer. That isn’t a condemnation of the structure of the single-player mode so much as an enthusiastic appraisal of a game that balances its simple shooting mechanics well with stages that draw out different battle experiences thanks to smart design. The relationship between the weapons, levels, and life system make it easy to jump in for exciting battles suitable for different skill levels but not mindless thanks to the rewards for level knowledge and wise firearm usage, and if elements like the cursor aiming was cleaned up and some AI opponents could be slipped in, the game could have achieved even greater longevity than it already accomplished. Some of the shackles of technological limitations of the time would be removed in future games like the TimeSplitters series that deliver a lot of the same thrills but with more options and ideas implemented, but GoldenEye 007 isn’t entirely antiquated despite sometimes contributing entire levels to future titles like Perfect Dark. The secret agent work feels like it sits in a smart balance between investigating the unknown and action while the multiplayer’s constraints often ensure battles are quick and enough factors like weapon choice can shift the dynamics around so they don’t grow stale.

You’ll still likely get more out of future first-person shooters, but some of the compelling ideas that helped GoldenEye 007 become such a star of the Nintendo 64 library still come through even for someone with no nostalgia towards it. It wasn’t totally a matter of being the right game in the right place, some solid fundamental concepts and accommodating level design was key to bringing out the best in this approach to shooting mechanics. You will have to meet it on its level in regards to graphics and controls, but once things click into place, GoldenEye 007 still offers a cleverly structured single-player and electric multiplayer component that make the game enjoyable rather than just an important cornerstone of console gaming history.