Article by: FinalGamer 11/8/2010 12:41:12 PM
Hello all! Sorry for being absent for so long, I was happily pissing away with nothing to review. To make up for it, I got this and reviewed it all in a weekend for you to read. The Scottish version will come up after this post. Enjoy!
(The rebirth of a legend, or the dark stain upon a classic?)
MODERN GAMING
GoldenEye 007
Developer: Eurocom
Publisher: Activision
Year: 2010
Genre: First-person shooter
System: Wii
Remakes are a dangerous thing to do. Sometimes in videogames they're pulled off tremendously well such as Super Mario All-Stars where nothing is changed except the graphics. Other times, they can be horribly ruined like Frogger. A more complex game, such as Goldeneye, is a difficult task to remake, a game that has been rendered immortally a classic by console gamers, moreso for those who did not experience first person shooting from DOOM or Wolfenstein. So how did Eurocom handle remaking the Rareware licensed classic? Lemme tell ya.
Story - The entire story is essentially the same as the movie, in fact the remake follows the story more closely than the original did. 007 and 006 arrive at the Archangelsk Dam in Russia to deal with a weapons facility believed to be targeting British embassies around the world.
006 gets killed and Bond heads off to hunt down General Ouromov's plans for an EMP-resistant helicopter, tracking it to Barcelona where it is then involved in a massacre at a remote Siberian base, Severnaya, where an experimental satellite named GoldenEye had its controls at. If you saw the movie and remember the original game, then little is different other than having some deeper story and less shooting.
Gameplay - Firstly, let's make one thing very clear. A LOT has happened in the world of games since the N64 game in terms of physics and AI. What was once revolutionary at the time is now commonplace all over. Sniper zooms, enemies ducking behind cover, alarm systems, reacting to shots upon individual body parts. They were all awesome back then, but now we expect to see them.
And the remake has all of that, just like every other shooter for the past 5 years. There's a wide variety of weapons from the original games, now given their proper namesakes, so you do literally now have the AK-47 to wield and such. The controls are supported by all four kinds of controllers (Wiimote, Wiimote & Nunchuk, Classic and Gamecube). Let's not even bother with the Wiimote alone, cuz seriously, I don't think you're going to be able to handle a first-person shooter with a Wiimote on its side.
(Just another day in the frozen lands of Severnaya....I wish)
The classic controller and Gamecube controller are pretty similar in aspect, with the classic being less sensitive than the Gamecube in terms of looking around, so it is a preference up entirely to you. Personally I prefer the Gamecube controller for its simplistic layout that makes the game very easy to control. The wiimote and nunchuk has controls similar to that of Call of Duty 4: Reflex, which may be a good or bad thing to you. The aiming is quite good, the nunchuk is pretty responsive to moving you around all over.
Hell you might even prefer it over the Gamecube controller for the sake of this, you feel quite light in being able to whip out your weapons and shoot wherever so any fault of aiming will entirely be your own. That's the controls covered.
The gameplay itself.....okay, I'm going to be straight up honest with you. If you have played a first-person James Bond game in the last three years, this is not any different. I'm sorry but it's not. They reskinned the levels a little, changed the layout a LOT more, but it's just another Activision Bond game. Don't get me wrong, it's not a terrible game, on its own merits it's actually a pretty decent shooter, scratch that, a pretty decent shooter on the Wii. And that's saying something for sure.
There are a lot of things you can do in this, you can melee enemies, subdue them from behind, use a pretty badass SmartPhone to take pictures and hack systems, as well as have some kinda epic QTE moments such as riding a motorcycle to reach a plane before it hits the bottom of the valley.
The enemies are actually pretty intelligent in this game, even on the easy Operative mode. They hide from you cleverly, they shoot around corners, they circle around hallways and stairways to sneak up behind you, it's actually refreshing to see enemies that actually think by themselves to such a level of being able to take you down legitimately so.
The objectives are sometimes a little unclear on higher difficulties however, due to the fact you have to actively bring out the SmartPhone manually so and scan around the room. At least you're not forced to do so, but if you don't complete all the objectives, you don't get to do the next mission unless you want to do it on a lower difficulty.
Patronising yes, but that happened in the original too so can't blame them for that. The missions themselves are also now longer, more complex and actually have a little more relevance to the progress of the film.
("So on your insurance report you wrote cause of accident as JAMES BOND." "Ah huh?" "......yyyyeah we don't cover that.")
Now we come to the multiplayer. Holy shit, the holy grail of GoldenEye was the multiplayer, cuz there was nothing better on a Sunday afternoon to do than to grab the controllers and shoot your friends or blow them up with mines. That was the shit. You remember when you could pick ANY James Bond character, choose any layout of weapons you want from the start and just have fun?
Well FUCK YOU because you don't get that from the start. You get James Bond of Duty: GoldenEye Reflex Edition. It works EXACTLY the same way. I'm not even shitting you. People come, online against each other in a variety of layouts, and you have experience points. Obtaining the experience points by being generally awesome unlocks new weapons and characters over time.
Now....let me just say this. THAT IS NOT GOLDENEYE. THAT IS CALL OF DUTY. If this was an original Bond game like that other one called Blood Stone coming out around the same time, I wouldn't mind this. I wouldn't mind the Activision smear of generic Bond-coated shooter or the Call of Duty-based multiplayer. That's not a bad thing IF it's an original game.
But this is not an original game.
This was meant to be fucking GoldenEye, with reskinned maps of a very similar layout, an untouched multiplayer that would offer the same amount of fun as the old one, and better AI. I don't even mind the fact we have Daniel Craig or that every major character's face is now different for licensed reasons, but this is the fucking insult.
(Not pictured: Fucking GoldenEye)
I was going to call it a game that could never live up to the original but is all in all an actually decent shooter, but this is fucking insulting, I am VERY insulted by this dismemberment of the GREATEST thing about the original game, the fucking multiplayer and now it's a fucking Call of Duty clone. I HATE CALL OF DUTY'S MULTIPLAYER, I AM SO SICK OF IT.
Anyways let's move on.
Graphics - Being on the Wii you're not going to get the same mastery of graphics as say Modern Warfare 2, so let's be a little lenient about this. The graphics are actually pretty good for the console. The characters are slightly ham-faced but that's to be expected, they still look quite good and Daniel Craig does actually look like Daniel Craig. The rest of the cast, like Bond, has had their faces replaced for the sake of licensing issues, except M who since GoldenEye has always been Dame Judi Dench, god bless her.
The levels themselves are not bad, in fact they're pretty atmospheric and vibrant with a lot of details such as rain at Archangelsk and snow flurries at Severnaya, people hustling up for colder weather, wind buffeting clothes, and the explosions can get pretty epic at some parts, especially the Runway. The runway alone as a demo could sell the game to you, but I am here to keep your mind straight folks.
So the graphics are, all in all, a solid effort, with a good atmosphere that can easily compare to Call of Duty: Reflex.
(Just another day at Archangelsk Dam-wait I know that guy on the left from somewhere!)
Music/Sound - The musical score, while not the familiar N64 music we all remember and love, isn't terrible in itself in the same way that John Williams is not terrible. It's just....all the same. It's James Bond, so we get David Arnold and wrap things up. Moody brass for covert stuff, flaring orchestra for explosions, you get the picture.
If you heard one James Bond soundtrack since GoldenEye, you heard them all, and this game is no exception. I will say the singer for the GoldenEye theme in place of the original by TIna Turner did quite a good job at covering the theme, so that's one good thing. Marks are immediately lost however for having no subtitles in-game. Fucking. Bullshit. Now I don't give a shit about the plot with my bad ear, so fuck you Activision.
So....what can I say? On the one hand the game itself isn't a terrible game. On the other hand, it's a disappointing remake. Some of you won't be surprised by this, and you know what, fair enough. On the other hand, was it really so difficult to just update the graphics of the original and keep the multiplayer exactly the same?
How difficult can it be, someone remade the multiplayer of GoldenEye with the SOURCE Engine online, and it was AWESOME. If one small group can do that, how the fuck can Eurocom not do it? There is no excuse, except perhaps from Activision possibly tampering with the process and thinking EVERYONE loves Call of Duty stuff.
So yes, this is a disappointing remake, if you played the original, you will not be fully happy. On its own merits, it's not a bad game if you are desperate for a good shooter on the Wii. But trying to squander the name of GoldenEye, that's insulting. Fuck this game.
Fun and Innovation - 3
Replayability - 3
Gameplay - 3
Presentation - 2
(Additional referendum from the reviewer's father by his request, a late-40s man whose favourite game of all time, and perhaps the one game he is the greatest at to even achieve 007 rank, was GoldenEye on the N64:
"I remember the days when I could go back and forth on a single level, for hours, without being stopped at checkpoints, where I could just wantonly kill enemies all across the map until I got bored or they stopped spawning. Now, what's all this bullshit where I'm being held by the hand and have to ride in trucks like 006's little bitch?
All I wanted from this game, was updated graphics and the same multiplayer. I want to be able to stay for six hours on Severnaya, killing 1400 people with snipers and mines as I once did in the original game, but no, I can't do that in this game. I am very disappointed." )