Nobody does it better in this modern classic
| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Wii | 9.50 |
| Overall | 9.50 |
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A hasty review cobbled together from forum impressions - deal with it. Have you played Dead Space Extraction or seen it in video form? This game has all of that first person performance capture and high production values, only it's not excessive and the gameplay is non-linear. Despite the media deluge, Activision have managed to keep the majority of Goldeneye well under wraps. Despite fears of the game being a cash in, or even just an average Conduit like game, Eurocom have made a FPS that truly excels in the single player. Once you get past the opening area which reminds you of the N64, everything is different. This is a whole new design, not some cash in or some attempt to blatantly copy the level design of the N64 game. And importantly it retains the Bond feeling. I think the game out does COD in the single player, it actually out CODs, COD. Why is this? Well I keep coming back to the Halo comparison. Call of Duty single player is style over substance, it's all smoke and mirrors. The AI is brain dead, the gameplay is the same sort of PS2 Medal of Honor only ramped up with production values. It's fun but mostly a brain dead affair. Instead of infinite spawning AI, Goldeneye gives you human AI as advanced as Halo, sometimes more so. They are aggressive and intelligent, they use cover well, they flank you, they circle around behind you, they catch you in crossfires. I was caught in a battle with only two enemies last night, I was perched on a balcony shooting down on them. Whilst I was concentrating on one, the other circled around behind me, came in the building and appeared behind me and shot me in the ass. That's clever. The descructible environments actually mean something too, as your cover points get destroyed and you can do the same to the enemy's cover position. Couple this AI and environment with smart controls and meaty ballistic weapons and you have a base gameplay that is always fun to play. And like Halo it's a game where you can replay levels making different decisions and the gameplay will always be different. For instance I ran to hide behind a truck, trucks explode when you shoot them but the NPCs very rarely blow them up. Just as I was going for the truck a helicopter in the corner of my eye shot some rockets with a streaming smoke trail towards it. I stopped mid-run just as it exploded in front of me. But whilst it features COD topping action, fear not stealth fans as most levels let you approach the game in any way you want. You always come equipped with your silenced PP9 and you can use stealth to make you way through the levels, picking people off one by one. I should also mention the superb level design. There are always multiple routes through a level. Like the original they saw that you could approach the old game in different ways and outside of the forced action levels, this game gives you a wealth of options to try out. When you are pinned down you can advance forward, or go back, or flank through cover at the sides, or climb up some stairs and try to shoot them from above. Or just sideskirt them where possible. There is no one forced solution. Also Bond is an agile fellow, imagine the way Leon can hop over fences and jump off rooftops with ease. You can do this Goldeneye. So despite the game ripping many COD staples like vaulting over objects and running and various indicators and ADS, the tweaks applied here make the game a better single player shooter. Bad guys are not fodder here, you can't just wipe out someone with a couple of shots, some guards for instance will take 4 or 5 pistol bullets before they are put down and Bond is much more resilient than your avatar in the COD games. You wont see a respawned enemy popping through a doorway and putting you down in miliseconds. Bond also seems much more agile, you can leap off walkways and a whole host of other things, making the gameplay feel much more visceral and sometimes tactical in the way you can approach battles. The AI has brains. Actual brains. The game doesn't mask threadbare gameplay by trying to overload your senses with wave after wave of respawning AI that run towards you or just stand there and shoot. Here the bad guys will run back for cover, they will sometimes run towards it and slide behind cover, or do little N64 like tactical rolls. They will stick to a safe cover spot if you find one. They will run towards you and shoot you close up if they think they have the advantage. There was one bit where I was in this room behind a printer taking fire. I ran up to a glass wall and melee'd it, it shattered and I ran out the exit I had created. I liked that a lot. When you go into ADS when crouched behind cover, Bond pops up just at the right height for you to fire back without losing your tactical advantage, something COD is crying out for. Also, crucially, it feels like Goldeneye and you can stealthily creep about and snipe bad guys. This is Bond and when not partaking in bombastic firefights you can stealthily move about the levels and snipe people with your silenced pistol, use thermal scopes to pick off unsuspecting enemies and even approach from behind and perform all sorts of motion captured techniques to knock out bad guys. Some of the levels are huge too, so many shooters on the wii have a limited scope, but the real estate on display here is girthy and substantial. Not just for show either, there are multiple paths and approaches you can take, I can already see myself replaying each level several times over to try out different things. The visuals look really good most of the time, when they use volumetric fog or weather effects, coupled with moody lighting and motion capture. When those things aren't being used it can look fairly flat in places with some bland textures here and there - mostly in the Club level. There are occasional frame dips, but nothing that should concern you. One thing that annoys me is the smartphone. You are suppossed to locate specific spots to scan like in Metroid Prime. You get this smartphone indicator when you are near something, but you can't actually move the smartphone about as easily as you can scan in say Metroid Prime. So it feels like you are rooted to the spot when you pull out the device. You are suppossed to look for these tiny little blue lights but they are often hard to spot. Thankfully you can clear out a room of bad guys and then look for what you need The controls are good, the defaults aren't great though so you will have to tweak to get it to your liking. As for the controls, as a wii FPS veteren I would say that they aren't as good as The Conduit but do match COD4 REFLEX. Reflex is better due to the ADS camera lock. There is ADS camera lock in GE but it restricts you to a small rectangle in the middle of the screen. If you have problems I can help so ask me. Bad news though - the analogue nunchuk lean is nowhere near as responsive as the one in MOHH2. And it tilts at far too sharp an angle. But it is useful when you want to peek out and get stealthy headshots. The snow level has awesome scope but also lets you stealth about picking people off, very cool. Then inside the bunker there are some snipers with laser sights like in Halo 3. As I lined up a shot on one he turned his sights towards me and the laser caused lens flare just at the moment I shot him. Wow moment right there. And then there is a night vision part like COD4 which is cool, reminded me more of splinter cell because of the way you can sneak about. Oh and the melee move with the nunchuk is the best melee move since Halo, it feels completely natural and works brilliantly. If there is some fool in your face a quick chop will butt the gun in his face, but that's only half the story. Because it's been performance captured it has a weight and motion to it that physically connects with you. Then as the opening camera pan of the archives started my jaw hit the floor. As a Goldeneye fan just seeing the familiar tiling and wall paint sent a giddy shiver up my spine. The actual level wasn't as good as the facility, dam, snow level or bunker but it was great fun, showing that a game doesn't have to have open battlefields and huge scope to be a hugely enjoyable FPS. Anyhow in the archives as you duck behind bookcases and they (and you) can shoot the books out of the cabinets And just randomly I saw this statue and I wondered, hey I wonder if I melee that will it.... and yeah, it split into 4 under my fist and crumbled to the floor. It just goes to show the little things, the attention to detail Eurocom have put in here. Also the AI is pretty darn smart, as I advanced forward the guy in front of me did a little backwards hop, over the cover point and took up a new position. This is not just a great Wii FPS. This is a great FPS, full stop. On the multiplayer front there is 4 player split screen, and the graphics take a noticible hit when doing this. But there is also online 8 player with a bunch of fun maps. The multiplayer is a lot like COD only draped with a Bond vibe in the weapons, levels and characters availible. I'll leave you with Edgecrushers words, a guy who knows his sh*** and enjoys FPS. "Goldeneye is awesome. Finally, the Wii gets a FPS that is on the level of the greats on the other systems. Hats off to Eurocom....they did the impossible. Bye." Notes: One thing that I've noticed is that if you don't complete all the objectives in a level it lets you continue but then drops the difficulty so subsequent levels are on the lowest setting. Only the game doesn't tell you, you have to go to mission select to see what difficulty is open to play. Also, importantly, if you have a GC pad plugged into one of the controller ports, your wii remote might seem unresponsive and you might think you have a broken game. No, the game is assuming that you want to use the controller plugged into port 1. Just unplug it. HD screens here: http://thevgpress.com/forumtopics/the-goldeneye-wii-thread-reviews-and-hands-on-impressions-from-page-10-onwards_1305_12.html&perPage=20#comment91331 |
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Posted by gamingeek Fri, 12 Nov 2010 09:59:51
Recently Spotted:
*crickets*
GG, Will you play multiplayer with me?
They take concepts from the original game and run with it. Honestly I was blown away by what they did on some levels like Severnaya or the Bunker, Facitlity and Dam. It seems somehow familiar, yet excitingly new.
If it had just been the same game with better visuals I wouldn't be so happy with the game, truth be told.
I was replaying some levels last night and experimenting. I could play this for the next 6 months and I haven't even got into the multiplayer yet.
So I played the outpost (snow level) on 007 mode, did all the objectives, loved it. Then I should have gone onto the bunker but I just saw all these different ways I would have played outpost. So the next day I started it again and took a completely different approach. First I snuck up and choked a guy to death. Then under the bridge instead of creeping about stealthily and picking them off, I started a firefight. So the enemies started flooding in. They rarely just spawn from nowhere or anything, I turn around and right next to me 3 guys start sliding down the edge of the snowy cliff. I pop these guys and fall back to a safe cover point.
Of course, they try and shoot me from a distance and eventually throw grenades, forcing me to run forward towards them and pick a new cover spot. Then there are guys on the top of the bridge shooting down on me. I run under the bridge so they can't hit me. But the underside of the bridge is clouded in smoke from a prior explosion. The radar in this game only shows the enemy position when you have line of sight, so if you are tracking a guy on a radar and you hide behind an object, you will momentarily lose his position and not be able to predict where he will go next. Very clever, very cool.
So amid this smoke filled under bridge, I was ducked and sweeping around, not being able to see the enemy or having to watch for muzzle flare or shadows. It was frigging tense and because of the radar I kept having to try and check and predict where they would go next.
So cool.
Next up I reached the 2nd mountain assault where they set you up with sniper rifle. Hell no I said, you know what, I am going to assault this cliff filled with snipers and other goons with a freaking shotgun that only works in close quarters. Cue me dodging and weaving, taking heavy fire and trying to make my way up the cliff, being flanked by bad guys. It felt like Saving Private Ryan. And I would sweep out of corners and shotgun fools in the face or run up and melee them with the best melee move in gaming today (IMO).
Then I should have gone to bed, but instead decided to just toy around with the Construction level. I could not stop playing and then switched to the archives. Wow. 2nd time through the archives when you had an inkling of the layout, it was so much more enjoyably. It's closed quarters combat, action packed at every turn, it's a style of shooter you don't really see anymore where FPS try and give you huge vistas or large battlefields. There was so much variety in the combat, I could shoot out glass windows and melee them out, then hop over walls or objects like in RE4.
And guys start crashing in through the windows on ropes. It was freaking intense. I am so happy with this game.
Certainly with 9.5 on it I have my expectations set to stun.
As a single player gamer and someone who likes using either stealth or action this is a FPS that gave me everything I wanted.
Most reviews I read they ewwwwwwww used the classic controller.