It doesn’t happen often, but it’s always distracting when you see a small element of the architecture-a fire alarm, for instance-that looks like it was painted on in a hurry. They serve as a jarring reminder that nothing you’re seeing is real.Įlsewhere, you’ll strike an enemy with a melee attack and he’ll buckle backward even though no contact seems to have been made on-screen, or you’ll find a texture that provides painted-on dimensions to what is clearly meant to be a three-dimensional object (but which was never rendered as such). The problem here is that those nicks often appear and then float inside the doorframe, without a surface to cling to beyond pure oxygen. During such shootouts, you’ll often see the circular nicks that bullets produce when they slam against stone walls. I often find myself involved in shootouts with goons where I use a doorway for shelter so that I can pause to recover. Your play style will affect how many of those you encounter. The developers also appear to have made their peace with a number of less significant technical quirks. You’ll find a lot of confined spaces here, serviceable but largely unremarkable areas with limited real estate that fail to provide a grand sense of scale. Nintendo’s little white box lacks that sort of horsepower, which naturally informed level and scenario design. Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are capable of producing incredible architecture and expansive environments like those you’ve seen if you played something like Assassin’s Creed or Grand Theft Auto IV. Development duties this time around were assumed by Eurocom (the same developer responsible for many of the EA-published 007 titles from the GameCube and PlayStation 2 era), which results in a familiar and polished experience that expertly caters to the nostalgic among us while providing everyone else with compelling new reasons to play.ĭespite providing a great foundation, Reloaded’s history also works against it. You’re due for some disappointment if a current-gen trip down memory lane is what you wanted. The first thing you need to know about GoldenEye 007: Reloaded is that it’s a gussied up version of the Wii title, not the Nintendo 64 edition. Now I’ve totally made up for my initial failure. Which is okay, it turns out, because this week Activision released a visually-upgraded version for Xbox 360 (and for PlayStation 3). I meant to play that one, but I never got around to it. That inevitable effort was last year’s GoldenEye 007 for Wii. The game is an icon, so of course someone eventually got around to remaking it. To this day, if you ask a group of long-time Nintendo fans to name their favorite Nintendo 64 games, GoldenEye will be mentioned early in the following discussion. I know that I’m not the only old school gamer who cherishes such memories. I’ll remember struggling to shoot locks off a plate of metal so that I could escape a train and I’ll remember wandering around the archives building for hours, unsure of where I’d been and where I was going. Less fondly, I’ll recall single-player games where I tried to escort Natalya through a jungle and she kept walking into turret fire or picking fights with goons toting automatic weapons while she herself may as well have been armed with only a peashooter.
Until dementia or death takes the memories away, I’ll fondly recall the four-player matches in the college dormitories where everyone in the room except for me was drunk or high and I was dominating one round after another using just the pistol. I hope that I will always remember how exciting it once was to play GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64. Late in the game, I was delighted to find that I actually enjoyed protecting Natalya when the need arose."
It’s clear that you’re going through the same motions you always did, but now those motions are more enjoyable. "Stages may feel generic, but they now flow in a more natural fashion and enemy placement was more carefully considered to provide interesting challenges. GoldenEye 007: Reloaded (Xbox 360) review