GoldenEye: Rogue Agent

Goldeneye: Rogue Agent is an in-house EA project, and it shows. While you may remember EA doing good things with 007: Everything or Nothing, rest assured that the glory days are over, or at least on haitus. Goldeneye: RA is a shameless attempt to cash in on actually good game of the same name (Goldeneye for the N64), and has absolutely nothing to do with that game.

The concept of the game is slightly clever. We've been playing Bond all this time, so what would it be like to be his enemy? Well according to EA, it's pretty boring. I pictured a sort of anti-bond, who still gets chicks and cool cars, but blows up homeless children and gets rich. Actually, what you do is just shoot other bad guys out of "revenge".

The premise of the story is that you've been kicked out of MI:6 for being too brutal. You also have only one eye, a souvenier from an incursion with Dr. No. Needless to say, No isn't on your favorite persons list, so when Auric Goldfinger recruits you, he does so dangling your sweet revenge as the reward. While this may make sense from a logical standpoint, you the gamer will not care. You did not lose your eye, nor can you really identify with it unless you're missing an actual eye. For arguments sake, we'll pretend like you have both your eyes. Had we watched Dr. No cruelly pryed our eye out with a spoon or something, we might have cause for revenge, but "Dr. No broke your eye, get him!" doesn't really cut it. Even so, this is the best part of the story. The rest of the game amounts to accomplishing predictable tasks in exotic locales. No higher motive ever really presents itself.

The graphics are a strong point. RA has plenty of eye-candy and everyone animates as you would expect. Some of the death animations are a little over-the-top, but hey, it's Bond, over-the-top is kind of a given. There's a boatload of guns to use, but honestly, they all have just about the same effectiveness. A couple novelty items like the rail-gun and explosive dart type things show up, but shooting someone in the head isn't that hard.

The unique thing about RA is that you have the "goldeneye." Which is an upgradeable new eye for you that goldfinger installed. It has various semi-useful upgrades, but for the most part you'll only use the bullet shield (how is that related to your eye?). The level design would've been pretty good if the levels were cut down in length by about 70%. There are only 8 levels in the game, but they take forever. You will literally say, "What am I doing here again?" on pretty much every level. EA could've stood to break up the missions more, or add more information to the in-game "story updates" so you knew what you were doing. That said, not knowing what you're doing doesn't hinder your progress. You just follow the arrow down the extremely linear game and you'll be fine.

The sounds are all pretty much what you expect. Nothing really stands out as bad or good. The enemies announce your location sometimes, and at the beginning that's really cool because you think it's high level AI. Later on you really just want them to be quiet and die, so you can move on to the next similiar looking section.

While the game has multiplayer components, they are not so good as to redeem the game from bargain bin material. In the age of Metroid Prime 2 and Viewtiful Joe 2, a game like Goldeneye: Rogue Agent just doesn't cut it.