Back in That Goldeneye 007 Groove with Agent 64 – Spies Never Die

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It’s funny how debates about games (or anything really…) come up sometimes. I wrote about last week’s Nintendo Direct, and in that post I mentioned that “new” versions of Goldeneye 007 from the Nintendo 64 era were announced and are coming out soon - most probably around the holidays of this year.

Later that evening we had a team meeting with our TapTap cohorts in Shanghai, and Goldeneye 007 came up then as well as people seemed excited for these “new” versions of this storied game. I voiced my opinion that I always thought the game was mediocre at best, but I understood that it was many people’s gateway into the world of multiplayer shooters. I had already played DOOM at LAN parties and the like several years earlier, so what Goldeneye brought to the table in 1997 wasn’t all that cool or novel to me. I then took it one step further by stating that I thought Rare’s follow-up to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, was the superior first person shooter on the wonky ol’ N64.

The next day, TapTap’s social media guru, Kim, sent me a message about Agent 64 – Spies Never Die which is a 21st century mish-mash of what made both Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark great fifth generation games. At first I thought he was trolling me a bit, but a quick trip to the game’s Steam page proved me wrong. Agent 64 is a “work of love by a dedicated fan,” and you can tell right out of the gate that this fan isn’t playing around. The game looks, sounds, and feels like it’s been ripped directly from the polygonal heart of the N64. Even the dumbass, run-right-into-a-hail-of-bullets 1997 AI has been well replicated in Agent 64.

There’s only a demo available now (the full game is supposed to be coming sometime this year), and it only includes a single story mission, but there are three difficulties with a scaling list of objectives to complete like planting explosives on a server farm or calling in an evacuation order, but just those three difficulty settings alone can and will keep you busy for some time.

Most importantly though, the gunplay itself in Agent 64 is a certified blast. It feels great to instantly land body shots with generous auto-aim after popping out from behind a corner, and it feels even better to pull up your aim mode sight (with the left trigger) to manually cap the bad guys in the cranium.

As fleeting as the Agent 64 demo can be once you’ve gotten your bearings in it, gaining that know-how and building up muscle memory is the compelling gameplay loop here. Working up to the point where you can tear through the geometric, stiffly animated goons is the only reason you’d even bother with something like this in 2022. It just does what it needs to do (for one level, at least), and I’m very much here for that.

According to developer Replicant D6: “The graphics, the gameplay, and controls are already very close to what you can expect from the final release,” so it’s a only matter of adding “more content and polish” before we’ll see a release of the whole experience and I for one will be waiting with bated breath on this game.

💬 What are some of your favorite old-school first person shooters? Do you have a specific memory that’s tied to a FPS certain game like many seem to have with Goldeneye? In your opinion, which is the better game Goldeneye 007 or Perfect Dark? Let’s see what YOU have to say down in the comments!

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