You're going to have to accept that I love Bond movies to an unreasonable degree. There's nothing anyone could tell me to dissuade me. I'm fully aware that they're misogynistic; that they're occasionally barely even movies; that they're shamelessly silly capers where body counts pile up but it all seems in good fun. I, more than most I think, am fully aware of the problems of the Bond franchise. That doesn't stop me from loving each and every film in the series to death (yes, even A View to a Kill). As Roger Ebert says, some movies are trash, but some movies are my kind of trash.
This extends to the games as well. Everything from really good Bond games (like Everything or Nothing, or the original GoldenEye, of course) to the super shitty ones (Nightfire, anyone?) are enjoyable to me because they all exist within the Bond universe, a place of dapper Englishness and madcap violence, of double entendres and cars that turn invisible.
I loved this remake far more than it deserved.
First, a small history lesson. EON Productions, back in 1995, was putting the final touches on the GoldenEye film, finally bringing Bond back to the movie screens after a seven-year hiatus. That film was successful mostly because it updated a lot of the Bond series touchstones for the 1990s, things that had been abandoned in the last film starring Timothy Dalton, License to Kill. The film had the same focus on action, yes, but it also told a generally engaging story while keeping the delightful inanity that had permeated the series from From Russia with Love all the way through to The Living Daylights. Plus, it featured probably the best acting turn from a Bond since Sean Connery, with Pierce Brosnan maintaining a dapper affability that Dalton just couldn't muster. Not to mention the most genuinely threatening villain the series had seen in a long time in Alec Trevelyan, played with aplomb by Sean Bean.
While GoldenEye is probably either the best or second best of the Brosnan pack of films, it's not really the film that people remember. Oh sure, it was reasonably successful at the box office, but installments like the aforementioned From Russia with Love or Casino Royale are still heralded as the best in the series. What really crystallized GoldenEye's reputation was (quite unbelievably actually) the game that EON Productions commissioned from Rare, the second-party Nintendo developer behind games like Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie.
Though the first-person shooter genre had of course existed prior to GoldenEye, no game was nearly as successful at transporting the PC FPS setup to a console. In a flood of movie tie-in games, GoldenEye stands head and shoulders above most of the entries in this dubious genre (the fact that we have a category of reviews called "Movie Games are the Worst" should be proof enough of this), and this is because of that original game's dedication to taking the situations of the movie and making them "game-y" in a genuine way. It also doesn't hurt that Bond movies were and are essentially movie versions of videogames to begin with.
Of course, what most people remember the original GoldenEye for the most was its outstanding split-screen multiplayer, but I'll be getting to that later when I've actually had a chance to try out the remake's multiplayer component.
Anyways, let's flash forward a few years. Nintendo relinquished control of Rare, and a bidding war ensued between Microsoft, Nintendo and Activision to buy out the company. Microsoft ended up winning this bidding war, and Rare became a second-party Microsoft developer. This put the possibility of a remake, let alone a re-release on, say, the Virtual Console of the original game a near impossibility. Unlike games like Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo didn't retain any of the rights to games like GoldenEye; however, they did retain the rights to exclusivity on any future GoldenEye games.
Enter Activision, they of the iterized shooters and Hero games. Looking to make some money, they endeavoured to remake a beloved game and cash in on the name. They couldn't get the rights to actually remake the original game, though, because Rare still owned those rights; and they couldn't do any sort of multiplatform finagling because of the Nintendo deal. What they could do, though, is get the rights to make a game based on the movie, which is where we're at now.
So GoldenEye 007 on the Wii and DS isn't a remake of the original game – but it has made all of its levels based off of the same locations in the movie that the original game did, and it's included a very similar multiplayer to boot.
Let's start with what they got right. Eurocom, the actual developers of the game, actually put a lot of effort into the look and feel of the game, and this attention to detail is really nice to see in the oft-maligned Wii FPS genre. The environments and animations all look really lovely, and this is probably one of the best looking realism-simulacrum games on the Wii. This sort of sky-high production value extends to many of the other areas of the game as well, with many of the guns being the official licensed versions that were given creative aliases in the original game, as well as a "cinematic" score from David Foster, a redone theme song by Nicole Scherzinger (I'm puking a little bit in my mouth while I'm writing that, but I have to admit that it's nearly as good as the original done by Tina Turner), and solid voice acting by Judi Dench and Daniel Craig.
Wait, what? Daniel Craig? That's right – the rights to Pierce Brosnan, too, had lapsed, so this is a "reimagining" of the original story, set in the year 2010, and with Craig's more visceral Bond in place of Brosnan's derring-do.
This actually makes the story work quite a bit less well than it does in the movie. The situation of having a double-0 agent betray another works well here, but the "super EMP satellite" story seems just a little too over-the-top 90s for such a no-nonsense portrayal, and while it's all delivered with superior voice acting, there's little details, like Zukovsky's badituding and the toned-down ridiculousness of Xenia Onatopp that just don't gel with a Bond aficionado like myself.
Thankfully, the game is actually a lot of fun to play. Sure, it's all very straightforward run-and-gun, with absolutely no exploration or objectives besides "kill everyone," but the gameplay doesn't seem to take itself nearly as seriously as, say, Modern Warfare 2. This game actually runs off of a modified Modern Warfare engine, and sequences with night vision goggles and sniper rifles feel a little too much like those games, but then there are sequences where you can hack into gun turrets with your smartphone, or run over jeeps in a tank, and the game's much more loosey-goosey feeling comes back and made me feel pretty happy. Unless a game's going to fully commit to being a "deep" FPS like in the Half-Life series, then a game that doesn't actively offend me (like Modern Warfare does) is infinitely preferable.
This brings me to the two best elements of the single player: stealth, and the actual mechanics of the game. First off, sure, the game comes packed in with a Classic Controller Pro (painted gold!). But don't even bother. The Wiimote and Nunchuk combo is so much more precise and fluid that I can't even imagine playing it the other way for any extended period of time. I so vastly prefer the Wii control scheme because it isn't that herky-jerky twin-stick setup that "hardcore" FPS players proclaim as the best. It's not, and that's just the objective truth. If it's what you're used to, then great, but it's a clunky way to play an FPS and I'd never go back.
These mechanics are all really well done, and play really well with the game's attention to stealth. Hiding in the shadows and making silent kills with a silenced pistol or a melee takedown (done with a shake of the nunchuk) is satisfying, but more importantly, can be pretty essential to your survival. Sure, you can go in with guns blazing, but more often than not, this will result in a quick death. What I was especially impressed with was the lack of overbearing visual cues for this stealth mechanic. It's all done through audio cues, and it's all very intuitive, a real rarity not only in Activision games, but in FPSs in general.
Now, for the bad: sometimes this is an aggressively dumb game. It's never very deep in its gameplay (besides the stealth mechanic, that is). Generally, you run in, kill some guys, run some more, kill some more guys, on and on. It's to the game's credit that I didn't really think about this until I was done with it – I was enjoying the hell out of it while I was playing it. But the fact remains that despite the controls, the reasonably intelligent AI, and the fun shooting times, that it doesn't add up to an especially memorable experience, certainly not as memorable as the original game was.
Maybe it's because not as much is left up to your imagination. Maybe it's because there's no Boris. But the fact remains that the single player ultimately feels hollow, and not hollow in the way that the best Bond movies feel. This is certainly an ineffable quality to the game, and it's certainly fun, but it's like a sugar high – there and quickly forgotten.
Well, that is, except for its final chapter and showdown with Trevelyan. It all starts out just fine, with a "protect Natalya from bad guys" setup, but eventually, there's a "boss fight" that is absolutely atrocious. It combines quick-time events with totally broken AI and hyper-unrealistic shooting requirements that almost had me throwing my controller across the room. It actually ends the game on an entirely unpleasant sour note that I think probably coloured my opinion of the game on the whole.
I suspect this will change when I try out the multiplayer. The game's always had a multiplayer-heavy focus, but I will say that I enjoyed the heck out of this game. Despite some nods to "modern FPS" contrivances (seriously, regenerative health* can fuck right off), this is some of the most fun I've had shooting dudes in a long time. And it made me want to rewatch the movie and replay the original game, so that must be saying something.
* The game does include varying difficultly levels. I'm not very good at these types of games, so I put it on "Operative" difficulty, which was still pretty difficult. I'm not against difficult games, so I'd say that the most legitimate way to play the game is on "007 Classic" mode, where health doesn't regenerate and you have to keep yourself alive using body armor. That being said, this is the highest level of difficulty, with the enemies being just way too overwhelming for me. I really, REALLY wish there was a way to play on 007 Classic mode and Operative, or whatever difficulty you want, because I just cannot get over how fucking stupid regnerative health is.