Great balance of updates and familiarity
I got in a lot of time playing Goldeneye on N64 back in the day, and wasn’t sure if a remake for Wii was a good thing or a bad thing. Would they leave it mostly the same and it would feel like buying the same thing again? Would they change things I felt should be left alone? I was worried for the latter when I found out they were using Daniel Craig instead of Pierce Brosnan (this is based on a movie, and the movie had Brosnan), and while that bothers me to a degree, I heard enough good things about it to pick it up.
I’ll start off with the familiar. You still start off single player at the dam, get to drive a stolen tank, escape a train, and other familiar levels including the statue park. The new levels aren’t identical though, but being familiar with the movie I actually found the new levels to often fit the movie better than the original. For multiplayer you still have 4-player split-screen where jaws, odd-job, et al are options. There are still proximity mines (a personal favorite) and I suspect it still wouldn’t be very fun to play with just one other person who likes to camp out and wait for me to try to get at him. You can still run around with a rocket launcher and run into someone around a corner and blow both yourself and them up with it. It also features Judi Dench as M, which is how the movie was. I don’t remember the N64 game having either her voice or her likeness.
Speaking of actors from Goldeneye the movie vs Goldeneye the game, the only actors you’ll ever recognize here are Judi Dench and Daniel Craig. The other characters of Trevelyan, Ourumov, Onatopp, Zokovsky, Boris, and Natalya actually bring the game down for being not only different from the movie (remember Daniel Craig is different) but also feeling generic. To fit in with the Daniel Craig version of James Bond, there are very few gadgets and the Cold War story is moved to a more modern setting. I didn’t actually mind Daniel Craig style (though I would have preferred Pierce Brosnan style) or even the modernized setting, but as the other characters largely didn’t match up with the movie anymore, they had to stand on their own and lost a lot of effectiveness as a result. I had heard there weren’t going to be gadgets like the movie and the N64 game had, but that turned out to be misleading since you have a smartphone that handles hacking and photography (among other things) for you. Makes sense to me that a modern spy would want one gadget that does everything.
My favorite changes come in multiplayer. Instead of starting with no weapons and having to find them on the floor, each player gets to choose their own weapon loadout, which they spawn with each time. There are no pickups except what other players drop when they die, so you could run out of ammo if you live long enough, or at least run out of your favorite kind of ammo. You can only carry two weapons at a time (plus explosives), so it’s easy to switch to the one you want since it’s simply the other one.
Online multiplayer was also added, which has the same problem every other online FPS has in that less-skilled players seem to die almost instantly at the hand of more experienced players. I tend to play team modes so there are less people trying to kill me and I can survive slightly longer. It would have been helpful if the game could have matched up similar skill levels. Online multiplayer can have up to 8 players while local is 4, with the same set of maps. Thankfully when you only have 4 players, parts of the map are blocked off so you don’t have to spend all your time running around looking for other people. An odd difference is that local multiplayer lets you choose from a number of preset loadouts but for online multiplayer you can customize. There’s an experience leveling system that limits what you can put in a custom loadout until you reach the level where everything is unlocked. That helps to not overwhelm you with all the choices by giving them one at a time, but I don’t see why those loadouts couldn’t be shared with local multiplayer. At the same time it’s probably good there’s no loadout with proximity mines in online multiplayer, and you need a high level to unlock them for a custom loadout. I would have really liked to see a local co-op mode like Perfect Dark or even better, Everything or Nothing.
I tried two of the control options: Wii remote + nunchuk (my favorite) and classic controller. I don’t have much experience with FPS on console, so had to get used to one of them. I did the remote + nunchuck first and maybe that’s why I like it better, or maybe it’s just more natural to point a thing at the screen than to tilt a stick. Unless of course you’re used to tilting a stick, in which case you’ll want a classic controller. I had two of each when rotating through 6 people, half preferring each method.
With only a few downsides, I highly recommend Goldeneye 007 for Wii to fans of James Bond or the N64 Goldeneye.
