GoldenEye 007: Reloaded

Taking a crack at remaking GoldenEye was one of the ballsiest things that Eurocom and Activision has ever done. It could have so, so easily backfired. But when it was released on the Wii last year, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than being a slavish HD remake, Eurocom opted to remaster the whole game, providing us with a fresh plot, Daniel Craig rather than Pierce Brosnan, and entirely new levels. And on the HD consoles, GoldenEye 007: Reloaded really hits its stride. It’s a cinematic experience, it’s a hugely entertaining ride, and it is definitely good enough to carry the prestigeous GoldenEye name.

Yes, Eurocom has churned out a game that adheres closely to the Call of Duty, corridor-shooter school of FPSer games. In other words, you’ll run down a corridor, face a horde of enemies in a shootout, and then run down another corridor. As a great example of this; let’s take a look at my experience with the remastered Facility level. I snuck down a corridor into an open room. This room was occupied by both guards and security cameras. I accidently triggered an alarm in this room, and I had to deal with a heavily-armed response squad that showed up when one of the guards triggered an alarm. With that room cleared, I wandered down a corridor into the next room, and it was like nothing had happened elsewhere in the facility. The guards there were casually wandering around their patrol routes and there wasn’t so much of a hint of alarms.

This set-up is understandable from a gameplay perspective; skill rooms are the norm for modern FPSers, and the structure of isolated skill rooms allow for real fireworks to happen. Regenerating health means you get to enter each room fresh, which in turn means the difficulty of each room can be quite high.

On the other hand, it’s disappointing that a Bond game lacks a consistent story. There’s very little fear involved with tripping an alarm when the fallout is so limited. Still, it’s good to see a FPS from Activision with a solid single-player campaign. It’ll take you a few hours to work your way through, and there’s even a super-hard difficulty mode that features no regenerating health and body armour — just like the original GoldenEye.

Then there’s the multiplayer which, as you’d expect from an Activision-published FPSer, is nicely robust. There’s a lot of maps that are well designed to keep the action moving, and the usual levelling-up as you play. There’s also a huge number of different ways to play, though you can't get an online game going in some modes.

More impressively, there’s split screen multiplayer on offer with GoldenEye. Now there’s a blast from the past, and it’s such a novelty in modern games that it’s worth having a go at just for the heck of it.

So, though GoldenEye 007: Reloaded is ultimately a concession to modern FPS trends, Eurocom have done a great job in producing something that remains true to the spirit of Rare’s classic GoldenEye. As such it’s a relatively fresh game in an overcrowded genre.