GoldenEye 007: Reloaded Review
How many remakes does it take to realize you’ve failed? 007 Reloaded is a remake of the remake done for the Wii, and both have taken turns for the worst. The game simply repackaged the Wii’s edition, but with the addition of some flashier graphics that still don’t resemble anything far from average, and some extra game play modes.
The game ships with an entirely new story than that of its N64 roots, though it packages plenty of fun to fans of the shooter genre. You’ll tear through hordes of enemy soldiers, interact in some fierce hand to hand combat sequences, and terrorize the streets of Russia in a tank.
There is plenty of over the top action to go around and although the single player campaign was a blast to play through, I could help but think throughout the entire adventure that this just wasn’t James Bond.
There were no fancy gadgets to call upon during your missions and using stealth to take down your opponents was shunned upon. The famed MI6 agent is glorified for his skill in stealth and secrecy in the field, so why was I given two machine guns and thrust into an open room jam-packed with enemies to gun down?
But in the end, it all comes down to was it fun or not, and it was. The AI proved to be a fairly tough enemy as well. Soldiers dynamically ran and maneuvered together across the battlefield, working as one unit to try to take me down.
In many cases, the bulk of the enemy force in front of me would lay down fire on me forcing me to duck behind cover while one or two other enemy soldiers would attempt to flank me. I thought this was genius, save for the fact that radar is always on, so I’d simply watch and wait for them to show up.
For those of you who haven’t played the game before on the Wii or N64, the story is set some times after the events of Quantum of Solace it begins as James Bond (007) and Alec Trevelyan (006) are on a mission infiltrating a chemical weapons facility in Arkhangelsk, Russia, which is believed to be the source of weapons used by a terrorist cell to target British embassies around the world.
When the mission goes wrong, 006 is shot and Bond barely escapes with his life. What happens next is an action-thrilled roller-coaster ride around the world as Bond tries to stop the mysterious terrorist group from undergoing the biggest bank heist in history; every bank in the UK.
The controls on the other hand diminish much of the fun from the game as they feel very, very clunky and take a while to get used to. The control setup is practically the complete opposite from any shooter you’ve probably played before, such as Call of Duty, so I found myself mistakenly performing certain actions like throwing grenades when I most definitively did not want to.
The single player experience also packs in an all-new MI6 mode, which is a collection of different objective-based game modes highlighting offensive, defensive, and stealth based tactics. These missions were a welcome addition since the campaign was so tediously short, roughly four hours, yet these tacked on modes felt unfinished. They also would’ve been much more enjoyable with a friend via co-op.
But what was most disappointing about GoldenEye Reloaded was the multiplayer, which was the meat and bones of its N64 classic predecessor. The developers got the framework down easy enough for the game, yet when it came time to put the experience into real-time, what came out was utterly terrible.
Each and every match I joined was virtually unplayable, as the game hiccupped and lagged uncontrollably when ever more than two people came onto the screen at one time. This problem mainly occurred in bigger, team based matches. If I joined smaller matches however, the problem seemed to be nonexistent; the majority of the time.
As for the graphics, it was a definite improvement over the Wii edition, but they definitely didn’t make full use of what the Xbox 360 and PS3 were capable of performing. Blurry textures and some “boxy” shapes plague the game. Developer Eurocom did make an effort to try an modernize the game however, implementing features such as partially destructive environments.
Closing Comments
GoldenEye 007 Reloaded delivers and fun and over the top single player campaign, yet it doesn’t feel like a James Bond kind of ordeal. And with a poorly constructed multiplayer experience, where the game should have been able to shine, it failed. Bond fan or not, I’m afraid avoiding this mission is probably in your best interests.