It was the summer of '97 - we were on a family vacation in Montreal and went to La Ronde Amusement Park for the day. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I was there; a Nintendo Megadome, right inside the park. It was like a dream come true. Even better, it was right before the release of GoldenEye 007, so I got my first look at what would soon become one of my favorite games ever. We played everything we could and left, VHS in hand, promoting some of the upcoming releases, including GoldenEye. There were some other promotional materials too, a dossier that would be thumbed through hundreds of times before we were graced with a copy of the game that Christmas.
It didn't take long for my brothers and I to fall in love with the game - the multiplayer, the single player missions, and unlocking the hardest missions and the cheats - quickly went from love to obsession. The game was practically glued to the cartridge slot of our N64 for years. Eventually Perfect Dark and the Timesplitters series would release, carrying the torch of GoldenEye into the future. But this style of shooter would fall out of vogue in the proceeding generation, replaced with more cinematic shooters like Half-Life and Halo: Combat Evolved. But for me, I never grew tired of this old school formula, and I've been patiently waiting for years for someone to revitalize this style of shooter. Enter Agent 64: Spies Never Die.
Truth be told, I've been following Agent 64 for quite a while now. I saw a video, downloaded the demo, and had a blast with it. Since then I've been anxiously awaiting its release. After a few weeks with the release version of the game, I can say with confidence that Agent 64 successfully reconstitutes much of the GoldenEye 007 experience, and even channels Perfect Dark, as well, in its implementation.
Like those older games, Agent 64 provides a variety of modes and challenges to satiate your old school shooter cravings. The single player mode features the familiar design where each mission offers three distinct difficulty settings, with Agent offering the fewest objectives and 64 Agent having the most. Of course, with each bump in difficulty, the enemies become more accurate and their bullets hit harder and less body armor can be found throughout the level. Also like the games it takes inspiration from, you must clear the missions on higher difficulty settings to unlock the later missions.
You can also jump into the Challenge mode, which evokes Perfect Dark's challenges/multiplayer design. In these extra challenges, you will be pitted against an array of bots and forced to reach a certain kill limit, capture a briefcase, or hold a position a number of times in King of the Hill. By the time you reach the Pro League challenges, you will be retrying often to manage to eke out a win. But it's worth it, because wins in the Challenge mode translate directly into extra content.
What content, you might ask? Well, multiplayer content, of course! No spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007 would be complete without its multiplayer mode. Like GoldenEye, Agent 64 reprises single player missions and alters the maps ever so slightly to make them more amenable to multiplayer skirmishes. This means removing dead ends and keeping the maps fairly open. Whether you play locally or online, against bots, friends or randoms, Agent 64 reproduces that style of multiplayer quite well.
The maps are compact and complex enough, to offer both constant shooting and nooks and crannies to hide and ambush your foes. The weaponry offered is directly evocative of the source material and they feel good to use, providing a similar punchiness to what you'd expect. There are also lots of modes and configurations to access, giving you lots of options of how you construct your matches. Unfortunately, I'm not a kid anymore and getting my brothers on a couch to play together isn't much of an option these days - so it's hard to say exactly how this mode will hold up over time in a more asynchronous world. Having played pre-release, it's impossible to say how the public lobbies are going to look come release, but I hope that it's easy to jump into existing matches, so I can continue to enjoy this mode after I have mastered the single player.
For my review, most of my time was spent on the single player experience - while multiplayer has always been the biggest draw of these games, I've always really appreciated the style of missions of those Rare N64 shooters, so I've enjoyed revisiting it in Agent 64. That said, I've found Agent 64 to be significantly more challenging than its source inspiration. In general, levels feel longer than the ones featured in either GoldenEye 007 or Perfect Dark, and the volume of enemies just feels greater, giving you very little room for error, particularly in the higher difficulty settings.
As an obsessive Kaizo SMW player, a perfectly deterministic challenge that just requires me to learn, master, and execute, is right in my wheelhouse. That said, even I started to grow weary on the longer missions, as it wasn't rare to get through most of it and be killed at the very end. This can be pretty discouraging and it was easy for me to lose the desire to make another pass through.
Of course, having content locked behind completing these more difficult challenges was a bit frustrating at times - so just know that if you want to see everything Agent 64 has to offer, you will be grinding. Unlocking the cheats, another returning feature from the classic games, is also extremely difficult, to the point where you basically need perfect pathing through the level and a crack shot if you expect to hit the mark. After getting a couple, I just stopped trying because it was becoming too frustrating.
The game also relies pretty heavily on keeping auto-aim on. If I'm on mouse and keyboard, I always shut that setting off, but here, there's no reticle that's added when you disable it. That means you have to just get a sense of each weapon and where and how it fires in order to be accurate, or stopping with secondary fire to aim and take a shot. There's a cheat I unlocked that gives you a reticle, but if you enable it in Paradox mode, you won't make any durable progress, which is unfortunate. I ended up turning auto-aim back on and it does work well enough, but I'd rather have had a reticle when it's off as a compromise.
Those frustrations aside, everything about Agent 64: Spies Never Die transports me back to 1997 in the best way possible. Enemies, graphics, music, and sound effects - they all feel so authentic, at times I lost track of the fact that I wasn't actually playing GoldenEye. It's an impressive feat, but it does prevent the game from having an identity of its own. While Perfect Dark and TimeSplitters took the same formula and made something that felt unique, Agent 64 is destined, by design, to just be a GoldenEye 007-clone. It's a damn good one, but it forces that comparison and doesn't always end up on the winning end of it - even if that's nostalgia speaking.
If you have a soft spot for Rare N64 shooters, you owe it to yourself to grab Agent 64: Spies Never Die - it's not perfect and you're almost certainly going to have some frustrations with it, but it does such a good job of capturing the essence of those experiences, you're not going to want to miss it. The multiplayer is likely to be a big draw if you have the requisite friends to organize matches, but it's hard to say if random matches will really provide the same excitement the game once did for veterans. Because it runs so well on even low powered PCs, it's hopefully easy to rope your friends into some classic styled play and relive those glorious matches of your youth.
