The first thing you might notice about this Eurocom-developed game is that James Bond is now being played by the current movie Bond, Daniel Craig. In addition to Craig's involvement, Judi Dench is reprising her role as M. The original writer of the movie has been brought on to "update" the story of the movie to make it fit better with a more modern Bond. So you'll still see characters like Alec Trevelyan and General Ourumov, but the game now takes place in 2010. In-game gadgets have also been given a fresh coat of paint, so you'll hack computers with a smartphone in the new game.
So it's telling a story that's roughly the same and taking you through a lot of the same sequences from the original game... but it also has very little to do with the actual game. Rare, the developer of the original GoldenEye, isn't involved with the project, so the levels can't be 1:1 remakes. But you'll still see some familiar sequences in new ways. The game still features the dam sequence and offers similar (though, I suspect, not legally actionable) design.
The other major difference comes from the game's controls. While you can play with a Wii Remote and Nunchuk, if that's your thing, I played the game with a Classic Controller Pro. With two analog sticks and plenty of shoulder buttons, the game simply plays like a modern console-based first-person shooter. None of the swimmy analog gun movement from the original is there at all, and you can now vault over low barriers. Heck, you can even hold down the left trigger to aim down the sights. With that control scheme in place, the game feels like a Bond-themed Call of Duty game.
Visually the game looks pretty good, and the action Activision showed off looked pretty intense, with some good melee kill animations. When you marry that to a proper, modern control scheme, you get a game that manages to recall the original game just enough to remind you that it was a popular N64 game without making you ignore all of the things that console shooter developers have learned over the last 13 years. It's out this holiday season on the Wii.
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