James Bond brings greatness to first person shooting.
THE GOOD
-Awesome multiplayer mode
-Great selection of weapons and game variants
-Excellent music
-Great story in single player mode
-Excellent level design
-Plenty of unlockable characters and other secrets
THE BAD
-Some maps in multiplayer are way to small
-Bad enemy A.I. on some missions
OVERVIEW
Goldeneye 007 is really one of the first mind blowing first person shooters. The single player mode lets you play as James Bond through the classic movie GoldenEye. The story in the game closely follows the movie with a few exceptions. It is the mid-1980s and James Bond is sent on a task to find any secret chemical weapons at the Byelomorye Dam facility. During the raid you meet up with another 00-agent, 006 or Alec Trevelyan, and aid him in the destruction of the facility. Everything goes well until the Soviets, led by Colonel Arkady Ourumov, find out about what is going on and pin down James and Alec. In their escape, Alec dies but James makes it out. Later, James meets up with computer programmer Natalya Simonova and the two find out that the Soviets have built the GoldenEye satellite weapons system. Fearing that the world is in danger, James and Natalya have to find the control station for GoldenEye and stop it before it causes mass destruction. The movie has a very good story and since this game follows most of the movie you can see why this game has a great story as well.
GAMEPLAY
GoldenEye 007 offers a single player campaign mode and a multiplayer mode. First, I'll review the single player. From the start you can select your difficulty from Agent (easiest) to 00-Agent (hardest). Before each mission you can look at your objectives that you need to complete in order to progress to the next mission. At the start of each mission you'll receive one or two weapons along with some extra cool gadgets like the watch laser. Being stealthy works out in your favor here. By using silenced guns you can take the enemy by surprise with out the danger of reinforcements coming. One down fall to this game is that the A.I. can be really dumb sometimes. A Soviet soldier might see you and instead of tyring to shoot you from where they are he will run closer and then shoot. This gives you plenty of time to aim and take him down easily.
Now, at the beginning of each single player game, you don't get to choose your weapon from the start but in each mission you'll be able to find other weapons to use. You can either find weapons lying around or kill the enemy and take theirs. And trust me there are plenty of really cool weapons in this game. The control scheme may take a while for beginners to first person shooters but once you learn how to play you'll be impressed with how intuitive the controls are. Basically, you use the analog stick to move around, the "Z" button to fire your gun, "C" buttons to strafe and look up and down, "A" and "B" to reload and switch weapons and the "R" button to manually aim. The game added auto aiming, which is a nice feature for beginners.
Now the single player mode is a lot of fun but most of your time will be spent playing the multiplayer with your friends. You and 3 other people can play a bunch of the boards from the single player mode with a good selection of game variants and weapons. Before the game you can customize the board, guns and game variant. All the boards are smaller renditions of the single player mode. You start with a few levels but some you have to play through the single player mode to unlock. This is also the same with playable characters like Odd Job and Jaws. Some of the game variants you can play are "Normal" (which is a standard deathmatch), "Flag Tag" (which is a capture and hold the flag for as long as you can game), and "License to Kill" (which is a standard deathmatch but it only takes one shot to kill an opponent).
GRAPHICS & SOUND
The graphics are amazing for GoldenEye 007. From the snow to the jungle and everything in between you'll see a lot of good visual detail. Another plus is the level design for the game. Both the single player and multiplayer are greatly enhanced by this.
Some of the music is straight from the movie which is very good. And the sound effects are equally amazing.
CONCLUSION
GoldenEye is an awesome FPS with plenty of replay value. This game is definitely one of the best games for the Nintendo 64 and is probably better shaken not stirred.