One thing Nintendo64 has, and PlayStation doesn't, that's 1st-person shooters. GoldenEye has been the best console 1st-person shooter for last two years while both Turok's have been almost the only competitors and it seems there's not going to be any competative games coming, except of course GoldenEye's so called sequel, Perfect Dark.

When GoldenEye appeared on N64, there wasn't a single 1st-person action game as good as GoldenEye, it offered intelligent enemies, great movie license and espionage action, which was all new and exciting at the time. When I played Quake on PC, I thought: Why can't there be an action game which would need a bit of thinking?, while shooting "scary" fiends with rocket launcher. Then I heard about GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo64, but I never had an opportunity to play it. The movie itself was pretty good and a little different from the earlier Bonds. Still remember the scene where Bond jumped a bungee jump down at the chemical

If you've ran all the time around, your aim becomes swaying. Realistic, yes.

factory at the beginning of the movie? Well, now your first mission is to infiltrate your way through a light resistance forces of russian soldiers to reach the dam. The storyline doesn't always follow the same line with the movie and the scenes are slightly different, thankfully.

Your weaponry usually consists of silenced or unsilenced PP7 (in the movie it's Walther PPK, because Rare didn't bother buying licenses for the weapons. Hence the names of the weapons are a bit different from their counterparts), but you can collect weapons left by the dead soldiers. Unfortunately, guns don't behave too realistically, for example when you shoot an assault gun, there's too little recoil. The pistols are far too accurate, it looks a bit funny when they continuously hit almost the same spot even when youre shooting from far away. Despite these little flaws, weapons are quite nicely done, especially the Sniper Rifle which is used in a couple of missions. I would have hoped more sniping, instead of those more action-based missions. One more nice thing you can do is shooting two pistols at the same time, though it's very rare to have this option.

Could I say that GoldenEye 007 is as realistic as the movie is, for example in just one mission, Bond can send easily over 50 soldiers to meet their makers. Someone would think this as a good thing, and someone wouldn't. The problem here is that in some missions, there are infinite number of enemies, especially when someone spots you and sets the alarm on. On

Looks like the end of Bond, James Bond, I presume.

the other side, if someone starts to run towards alarm bell, you can and really should eliminate him before he reaches the alarm. Shooting him in the head just before he alarms everyone is very, very rewarding, I haven't seen this kind of action in any other game. The enemies at the beginning of the game are a bit slow and clumsy, but wait and see the couple of the last missions: enemy soldiers shoot terribly accurate, react fast and they're much harder to kill. Animations are smooth, but in some cases they are far too slow: when they are slowly bending down to shoot you, you can shoot them with ease. If I remember it right, GoldenEye was the first game to introduce different bodypart hits, when you shoot a soldier in the head, he collapses at once. You can also shoot his hat away without harming him, looks a bit silly, but it's a nice "realistic" add. When enemies get harder and stronger, sometimes you have to empty your whole pistol clip to get rid of just one enemy, that is when you shoot him in the legs, chest or arms, so head shots are recommendable. I would have hoped less enemies, but they would have been far more deadly and intelligent, but hey, you can't have everything.

Remember this scene from the movie, where Bond makes his first appearance?

In the graphical department, there are not much to complain about: just few missions have fog, while others don't have fog at all. Effects are really astounding, my jaws almost hit my feet when I saw an explosion for the first time, they are the best-looking explosions yet seen on any console, hmm, don't know much about Dreamcast though. Unfortunately explosions lead to another, maybe the biggest problem in graphics, framerate drops dramatically. After explosion, appears smoke, while you can't see anything through the smoke screen, enemies shoot like there wouldn't be anything. Watching through smoke causes frame per second rate to chance more close to seconds per frame, which happens to be pretty annoying at times.

There's not much to say about sounds, but music is where GoldenEye shines. Although every song in the game concentrates on the classic Bond theme, there are many various styles. Missions in Cuba has more of an jazz-style Bond theme, and sometimes it's clearly techno. Weapon sounds are also pretty good, especially pistol sounds. In my opinion, machine gun sounds are not that good, I liked the sounds of KF7 (AK-47 in real movie) and AR33 (M-16 I think), but others just didn't sound right, all the shots sounded the same. Compared to

No, you can't knock the guard while hanging upside down in the toilet.

Half-Life's gun sounds, GoldenEye loses clearly (but hey, Half-Life appeared over year after GoldenEye did, and the sounds haven't been the strong part in any N64 title).

It is quite unfair to review a game which made it's debut over 2 years ago, and many PC games have overrun GoldenEye. But there is hope, GoldenEye's development team Rare, is doing a new 1st-person shooter, Perfect Dark, which should be more than interesting. I just fear that it would be too much similar to GoldenEye. I'm sorry I couldn't review the multiplayer aspect of the game, simply because I have only two controllers, so I didn't want to give you wrong impressions. Of course it's pretty fun sometimes with only two players, but only sometimes. Back then about two years ago I would have given GoldenEye all 5 stars, but now when Perfect Dark is coming and Half-Life has been on market for ages, I would have given just about 3 stars, so I had to make a compromise. I guess 4 will be enough for all of you GoldenEye fanatics.

Gameplay: 4/5
Graphics: 3/5
Sounds: 3/5
Lastability: 4/5

Overall:


Reviewed by: Janne "Blizzardic" Mankila

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