SPECIAL BARGAIN PRICE
GOOD CONDITION
BRILLIANT GAME - A MUST HAVE
Original Game + Booklet
With Pierce Brosnan vacating the role of James Bond, Electronic Arts has been put into an interesting situation. How do you make a James Bond game when there's no James Bond? Well, a hero is only as good as his opposition is bad, so there's certainly room to tell a story from the other side of the tracks. That's what EA has done with GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, but an uninteresting story and lackluster gameplay, both online and off, leaves this latest adventure feeling rather flat.
GoldenEye: Rogue Agent bears a similar name to Rare's Nintendo 64 first-person shooter, GoldenEye 007, which was a first-person shooter take on the Bond movie, GoldenEye. GoldenEye 007 is remembered as a classic, as one of the best early games for the platform. Yet this new game has absolutely nothing to do with that game, apart from belonging to the same genre, and it only has passing references to the film (namely the inclusion of the character Xenia Onatopp). By resurrecting the name, but not referencing much of the GoldenEye material, the whole game feels like a cheap attempt to cash in on the nostalgic feelings that many have for the Nintendo 64 hit. It's perhaps the most "evil" thing about GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.
GoldenEye's single-player campaign spans across eight missions, putting you in the role of a former secret agent that has been booted out of her Majesty's secret service for being too ruthless for the job. This sends you into the waiting arms of Auric Goldfinger, who takes you in and fixes an eye injury you received while fighting Dr. No by giving you--wait for it--a golden eye! The story then pits Goldfinger against Dr. No. However, the cutscenes that feed you plot points don't really keep you in the loop very well, and the menagerie of returning Bond villains make the whole "what if?" scenario feel like second-rate fan fiction.
Your eye implant has some helpful powers that become available as you progress through the campaign, and this is GoldenEye's only gameplay feature that makes it conceptually different from other recent shooters. You start out with the ability to see through walls, and then you quickly get the abilities to hack machines (specifically, to hit switches or to prevent guns from firing) from a distance, create a shield that blocks all damage, and unleash a telekinetic attack against enemies. All of these draw from an eye energy counter, which slowly rebuilds after use. The bullet shield is really the only truly useful tool in the set, though, as it always comes in handy. The X-ray vision and hacking are effective in a few specific spots, and the toss attack takes way too much energy to be useful in a crowd.
