Down the years, there have been plenty of James Bond games, but only one ever made any lasting impression on gamers: 1997's GoldenEye for the Nintendo64. The impression that the franchise was something of a poisoned chalice was reinforced when Activision acquired it in 2006, meaning it was able to make a Quantum of Solace game, but the credit crunch did for the next scheduled Bond film, so Activision needed to resort to something more imaginative than creating the inevitable game-of-a-film. Last year, it commissioned British developer Eurocom to remake GoldenEye for the Wii, and this year, we are being treated to GoldenEye Reloaded, another remake of the 1997 game, but for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Sure, there's a whiff of vanity publishing about the exercise, but having had extensive hands-on with GoldenEye Reloaded's multiplayer side, there's no doubt it is that rarest of beasts: a Bond game which will please gamers rather than leaving them feeling shortchanged.
New modes
One of the original GoldenEye's standout features was its four-player split-screen, which blazed a trail for multiplay on consoles in pre-broadband days. We sampled some of GoldenEye Reloaded's new multiplayer modes. The first, Escalation, was Death Match with a twist: kill-streaks automatically upgraded your weapon, and dying twice without killing anyone downgraded it. Thus, everyone started with a pistol, but as the game progressed, players cycled through submachine guns, assault rifles, heavy machine guns and so on up to the top weapon, a rocket-propelled grenade. There were some signature – but never before seen in a game – guns in evidence, most notably the laser rifle from Moonraker.
Detonator Agent was even more imaginative, as James Steer, the game's producer at Activision explained: "The idea behind that is that it's a risk/reward mode. You're carrying a bomb which you can hold on to or pass off to someone by meleeing them. But if you hold on to it, your kills get multiplied. If you make kills in the last 10 seconds before it goes off, you're getting tons and tons of points, so it's up to you how long you hold on to it." Although initially a tad confusing, Detonator Agent proved pretty moreish: you get a dot on your mini map showing you the general whereabouts of the detonator agent, so it felt like a new spin on the game's much-loved Golden Gun mode (which, of course, is in Reloaded).
Bomb Defuse is a team-based game along similar lines: your team must retrieve a bomb, place it in a certain area and defend it while it is defused. And the final new mode is Data Miner, in which your smartphone (an increasingly important Bond gadget in recent years) is downloading data, and everyone else is out to kill you to stop your download; every kill you achieve increases your download speed.
All the new modes added a welcome, Bond-related spin to the well-worn Deathmatch/Team Deathmatch format, which is surely what keen online first-person shooter fans crave. Early impressions suggested that GoldenEye could well develop a devoted online following. The maps were varied and interesting, providing nostalgic echoes of those of the original game, but adorned by the impressive late-console-cycle graphics we have recently come to expect. The control system's feel was immaculate, which is a basic necessity for a GoldenEye remake – the original Rare Software team spent a year working on the control system before even contemplating the nuts and bolts of the rest of the game.
More new stuff
Steer was keen to enumerate other aspects of the game which are new. Especially the MI6 Ops mode: "It's about giving people snippets of gameplay, so if people like being stealthy, there are MI6 Ops for them, or likewise if they like to run and gun. It takes the gameplay from single-player, but puts it in a more arcade style that you can replay and fine-tune to get the perfect score. I can look at the leaderboards and see that you got 10,000 more points than me in an MI6 Op, so I can click on that and play it as you set it up, and try to figure out how you got that score. You can go in and adjust how aggressive the AI is, or make it headshot-only – things like that to make it tougher for you, and that allows you to modify your score."
Steer confirmed that the single-player game is more or less identical to that of last year's Wii remake, with you playing Daniel Craig as Bond, and a storyline that draws on the film but reimagines it in a 21st-century context. Four-player split-screen is present and correct, and up to 16 players can take each other on via Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. Loads of new weapons, characters and gadgets have been added, including contact lenses that protect your vision from flash-bangs, Rosa Klebb's pearl-handled Beretta and Doctor Kananga's shark-gun.
Given that it's the second remake of a 14-year-old game, you could argue that GoldenEye Reloaded smacks of cynicism. But that would be misguided. It's streets ahead of any Bond game made in that 14-year period (including last year's disappointing Bloodstone), and anyone who goes to the trouble of playing it will realise that it's up there with the best first-person shooters you can buy. Except none of them also act as a repository for the characters, gadgetry and weapons accrued in the 50 years that Bond has been around.
