I Didn’t Enjoy GoldenEye 64
GoldenEye is, apparently, one of the most important and influential videogames ever made. It is often credited for legitimizing console shooters to the gaming public and many consider it one of the greatest videogames ever made. And so, after realizing that I could play the game through Nintendo Switch Online, I excitedly gave the game a shot.
I did not enjoy it all.
The first thing you should do, assuming you do not own one of the N64 controllers for the Switch, is to change the controls. They were designed for an N64 controllers and are unbearable for the default manner NSO maps N64 controls to a Pro Controller.
The second thing you should do, assuming you are like me and have only played console shooters released after 2001, is to discard everything you know about console shooters. The average shooter released on console today has two fire modes, aim-down-sights and hip-fire. GoldenEye also has two aim modes where one is much more precise than the other (it might have been the first shooter to normalize the concept) but unlike modern shooters, the “imprecise” aim mode is very accurate. You should be firing in “imprecise” mode very often.
GoldenEye 64 is the most lost I have felt playing a videogame in a long time. There are many reasons the game is disorienting:
- When an item can be interacted with, there is no text on screen that informs you a button can be pressed. Instead, the player has to guess that an item can be interacted with and press the interaction button.
- There are long text documents which explain your task that must be read before the mission is started. Sometimes these documents are necessary to provide the player with the necessary context to understand what they are supposed to do. These documents are treated in the UI as optional, and the documents themselves are filled with unnecessary flavor text. This means there is a lot of noise that obfuscates necessary information.
- Some equippable items can only be equipped through the pause menu, and the game never informs you of this. The button which cycles through items through ordinary play will ignore many mission-critical items in your inventory.
The absolute worst thing about GoldenEye 64 is the incomprehensible level design. The development team visited the real life sets for the GoldenEye movie before designing the missions. This means the levels are meant to look akin to real life places and contain abysmal sign-posting and unnecessary rooms. There are so many levels with endless identical-looking rooms and twisting corridors that lead to nowhere, and it only gets worth with each level.
I cannot overstate how exhausting it was to reach this game’s credits. Just the first level took me about two hours to figure out what I was supposed to do. The levels get increasingly lengthy and combat-focused, and the limited health means you have to start the entire level over if you die. There are no checkpoints and the final stretch of levels can take 20 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay to complete.
When you first play GoldenEye you might expect that the game is a tactical and slow-paced shooter. Instead of simple missions where you need to get to the end or defeat every enemy, the game is objective-based. The player must complete a collection of tasks in any order, and often the player must experiment and explore the environment in order to figure out what they are supposed to do. There are even minor stealth mechanics. Combat is extremely punishing because health is finite, does not automatically regenerate, and health regenerating pickups are extremely rare. The controls are unwieldy and awkward, and while aiming the player character has an idle animation that effects your aim, adding a human inaccuracy to your gunfire that requires patience to deal with. So you might expect like the Thief series, that you are expected to use stealth and tactics to avoid combat when necessary.
On the contrary, the game is filled to the brim with combat. There are so. many. enemies. The game will spawn them constantly, often behind the player. You are meant to feel like a super soldier, a one man army, a videogame manifestation of John Wick himself. So why are the combat controls so clunky????
Despite the negative tone there are many things I like a lot about GoldenEye.
The objective system is simply brilliant, and I am devastated that more shooters do not steal it. The objective system requires exploration and experimentation, which would be a very good thing if the game had better level design and signposting. The best part is the difficulty levels, which do not just reduce aim assist and improve enemy AI, but also add entire new objectives, some of which completely change the experience of the level. It is an absolute shame that more shooters do not use a better implementation of the GoldenEye objective system.
I like that the game has finite health. This means your mistakes during combat have consequence matter, and it makes the final few minutes of any level incredibly tense.
The soundtrack slaps.
I cannot recommend GoldenEye 64 to anybody unless you are nostalgic for the game because you played it in you childhood, are interested in speedrunning it, or if you are like me and are interested in videogame history. With that being said, there are many good ideas in GoldenEye 64. If only somebody made a game that takes the many great ideas in GoldenEye 64 and combines with level design that actually makes it fun to play…
TimeSplitters 2
TimeSplitters 2 was released in 2002 for the XBox, PS2, and GameCube, was developed by team containing many of the developers who worked on the original GoldenEye, and it is one of the best first-person shooters I have ever played. I genuinely cannot believe I only learned of it last year, and it fully deserves the classic status that GoldenEye has.
The first level of Timesplitters 2 is one of the best levels in any videogame, period, full stop. It has the atmosphere and environmental storytelling you would expect of the best of the best Metroidvanias, and half of the development time for the game was spent on it alone. I was utterly blown away by it on my initial playthrough, and you should stop reading my review and go play it on the Dolphin emulator right now. (Probably with the mouse and keyboard mod unless you are like me and suffered through a GoldenEye playthrough and developed a tolerance for the weird control scheme of these games.)
Unfortunately, TimeSplitters 2 does suffer from many of the same issues as GoldenEye, including egregious enemy placement, overemphasis on combat instead of tactics and puzzle-solving, and some objectives having insufficient sign-posting. (Despite my praise for the first level I had to look up a tutorial online for one of the objectives.) Other disappointments are the fact that no level is as good as the first. Most levels are linear and action-packed, which isn’t a bad thing per se, variety is the spice of life and all. But I wish that at least one more level had experimented with the brilliant story-telling and exploration present in the first level (Neo-Tokyo is a notable exception, although it is still not as good as the first level.) The final 5 levels are much worse than the first five (except for the Aztec level which was fun, although extremely racially-insensitive.) And to be perfectly honest, the missions Robot Factory, Space Station, and Atom Smasher are as terrible as the worst missions in GoldenEye.
Despite these many drawbacks I had a spectacular time with the first five missions of Timesplitters 2. I give it my highest recommendation.
So why is GoldenEye so influential, anyway?
Something that confused me when playing GoldenEye is the claim that is was influential. I find this confusing because it does not play like any shooter I have ever played. The objective system, finite health, and controls are very different from the typical console shooter.
The game was wildly successful, and mostly because of its multiplayer mode, which I unfortunately have not tried. Perhaps the influence of the game was the fact that multiplayer is such an important part of the average shooter nowadays, and the concept of having two aim modes, where one is more precise than the other. Or perhaps the influence was that it released on console and it made industry figures believe console shooters were worth developing.
Regardless, I would posit that Halo is a better candidate for most influential console shooter, since it actually established the blueprint for console shooters made today.