Genre: FPS
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Games
Release Date: November 22, 2004

Buy 'GOLDENEYE: Rogue Agent': Xbox | GameCube | PlayStation 2

Good Golly, Miss Molly. This is a pleasant surprise.

You know, in so many games, we’re forced into a hero’s role. You’re given a set of powers, and are instructed to save the day. Oh, but you have to play by the rules. Fight fair. Be nice while you deal out your punishment. Sure, there are much more efficient ways of dealing with your enemies, but they’re just not as honorable.

Honor is everything, you know. Well, everything except fun.

Rarely, does a game sit you down, and say to you, “Hey. Look. We know how you feel. So here’s the deal. Go ahead. Cheat. Play dirty. Be a total bastard. In fact, if you don’t, you have no chance of beating me. Got it?”

Ladies and gentlemen, aspiring supervillains of all ages, welcome to Goldeneye: Rogue Agent.

A word of warning: if you’re a softy at heart, do not play this game. If, however, you’re one of those people who like to win no matter what you end up doing to do so, then by all means, pop this bad boy in. It was made for you.

Don’t let the name fool you, though. This not your big brother’s Goldeneye. It has nothing to do with the 007 movie and game of the same name, and you barely see James Bond at all.

Not that any of this matters. I’m just saying.

The plot of Rogue Agent is just that: you used to work for MI6, on Her Majesty’s secret service, blah blah, all that stuff. However, you went up against Dr. No, and in a fight with him, lost your right eye. You didn’t take this very well—in time, you became a loose cannon-type agent, and M had no choice but to dismiss you from the organization.

Before this happened, however, Auric Goldfinger had made an offer for you to join his ranks. With nothing better to do, you took it up, and in return, he had his technicians give you a “golden eye” to replace the one you lost—an eye that turns you into a one-man army.

The timing on all of this couldn’t have been better, because it seems Dr. No’s decided to defect from Goldfinger’s forces and declare war on them for some reason or another. Therefore you, agent designate “Goldeneye”, along with other classic Bond villiains on your side such as Oddjob and Pussy Galore, get to tackle Dr. No’s forces, which includes Xenia Onatopp, of all people. Yeah, we all know she should be in her teens or something. Let’s just call it a dream match and be done with it.

Goldeneye: Rogue Agent is a first-person shooter, and it’s much more straightforward than the last game which bore this name. True, you’re given mission objectives, but they’re nowhere nearly as abstract, or complicated, or well-thought-out as they used to be. Now they’re just standard FPS fare. Get from point A to point B, hack this machine that just happens to be right in front of you, flick this switch, shoot everything you can, get out alive.

Were this all that this game had to offer, it would be very shallow indeed.

Fortunately, that’s where this game’s name comes in.

Your synthetic eye is given upgrades with each stage you pass in the campaign mode,
and in the end, you’re given powers that normal people just shouldn’t have. It gives you the ability to see through walls, personal shielding, remote-control machine-hacking, and a rudimentary form of telekinesis, for crying out loud.

Let’s face facts. With abilities like this, especially in a first-person shooter, playing fair (or like you’re playing Goldeneye 64) would just be stupid. Fortunately, Rogue Agent, after giving you these powers, encourages you to run willy-nilly all around the place, looking through walls to spot the enemy and then scoring no-look kills with railguns, jamming enemy weapons, hacking machines of death from a distance to “accidentally” activate and kill off everyone around them, mow down forces while wearing shields that your enemy’s bullets and bombs can’t touch, using energy punches, and tossing people around like pinballs. On top of all that, your energy regenerates if you’re not hit for a while.

Oh, yes. You’re a bad guy (well, as bad as you can get, anyway—sadly, you’re pretty much just a villain taking out other villains), and suddenly, life is good. Try to avoid cracking several evil smiles over the course of playing this game. Just try. It’s impossible. You’re even rewarded by how many dastardly ways you take out the enemy at the end of each stage, using the methods described above and more.

Did I mention that one of these methods includes taking human shields? Oh, they’re very fun.

There is a catch to all of this. Since you’re such a bad mother, Dr. No deems it fit to stack the odds against you. Your enemies are everywhere; in the sky, undergound, above and below you, in sickening numbers, and they don’t stop coming. As if that weren’t bad enough, they’re all equipped with E.V.I.L. Artificial Intelligence, which makes fighting any one of these guys very cclose to fighting an unshielded Halo Covenant Elite (…blue ones, though). Every time you do anything, they know about it, and they’ll often bark out that you’re using your shield, or a shotgun, or are reloading, to their squadmates. I almost lost it when I found out that enemies holding rocket launchers won’t just fire them at you if you rush them down. They’ll keep trying to put some space between you and them, because dying by splash damage is a bad thing. Truly, EA’s on to some good stuff here.

This is to say nothing of the tanks, jets and helicopters that get sent after you. Repeatedly. This game provides no mercy, giving you more incentive to do the same. It also means that cover is your greatest asset. Fortunately, there are few, if any, problems with the game’s controls--they’re a little loose no matter what your sensitivity is set to)--so you have full reign over how well you can accomplish your dirty work.

The soundtrack is a whole lot of blazing techno, that’s loud, in-your-face and relentless. Most of it is catchy (especially the title screen), but I’d be lying if I said a lot of it didn’t get lost in the sounds of battle. The voice-acting for the main characters is incredible, and people who missed out on the old-school Bond villains get to see how awesome and determined they really were. The game’s atmosphere is also excellently portrayed in the cutscenes where, again, the villains, displaced from their old movie counterparts and placed into the world of the present, still charismatically shine through. The in-game engine, in fact, is really the only “weak link” in this chain, if one can even call it that. It’s clear that they used a middle-ground rendering for multi-system capability, but what’s there looks passable nonetheless.

With so much this game has going for it, it’s sort of a shame that it’s going to be all kind of overshadowed by the likes of Halo 2. That’s because while Rogue Agent isn’t a technical sequel to the old Nintendo 64 classic, it certainly is a spiritual one… with the same twists this game brings to the genre. Not only do you get many of the same match types the old game had, and more, but you get to use the Goldeneye in multiplayer matches. This means that you’re not going to score any kills unless you’re as sneaky and underhanded with your powers and opportunities as possible. Xbox Live performance, when tested, ran smoothly, and the possibilities realized by being able to play a sort of “cheating deathmatch” are mind-boggling, to say the least. For anyone wanting a new spin on multiplayer FPS mayhem, they should look no further than this game.

It doesn’t have as much polish as some of this holiday’s other bigger titles. Nearly all your enemies look like WWE’s The Rock for some reason. The graphics are average at best. The levels can sometimes get repetitive. None of this matters. Rogue Agent has it where it counts; in gameplay, innovation and just plain, flat-out devious fun. People missing the old Goldeneye multi experience, this one’s the closes you’re going to get to a sequel, and with bonuses to boot. Old-school Bond movie aficionados (who aren’t scary continuity freaks), this one’s also got your number. Anyone else, bite the bullet and pick this one up. You may be surprised at what you get.

Score: 8.5/10