GoldenEye (Wii version) review
This review contains spoilers. Though I can’t imagine anyone who hasn’t seen the movie or played the original game would even be reading this.
At the time, I was having a blast playing it with my college buddies and my brother. I thought the game was aces for reasons that I still think are pretty well-justified.
Since then I’ve played more video games. And a wider variety of games, too. I’ve seen shooters far better than this GoldenEye remake produced by Activision (creators of the massive Call of Duty franchise) and developed by Eurocom (creators of that crappy Quantum of Solace game). I know a little bit more about understanding game design three and a half years later. So I decided to take another look.
At first glance, this remake of a classic, genre-defining first-person shooter may look like a watered-down Call of Duty rip-off with the James Bond name tacked on. Once you pick up the controller, you’ll find that’s not the case. Not completely.
The story of GoldenEye Wii is a modernized version of the film. Agents 007 and 006 are on a mission to destroy an illegal weapons cache in remote Russia belonging to General Ouromov. The mission goes awry and 006 ends up dead. Years later, MI6 is tracking a terrorist organization called Janus that seems bent on annihilating British intelligence. 007 travels from Barcelona to Dubai to St. Petersburg before finding out that 006 is alive and has sworn revenge on the British hegemony of the post-Cold War intelligence community. You then go to an African solar power plant to hunt him down once and for all.
There are also a lot of hacking sequences.
The presentation of the plot is drab and mostly uninteresting. The voice acting is just fine. The animations and expressions for the characters are so limited by the Wii’s hardware that it’s a wonder they even tried to have cut scenes rendered in-game. But the story just acts as a tool to bring us to different levels. The variety and design of the stages here is nice. For example, the inclusion of the Spanish nightclub and the re-touched Severnaya missions are linear, unlike the original’s slightly-more open layouts.
The primary reason that this GoldenEye remake doesn’t suck is because it knows it’s GoldenEye. I was totally worried that the creators of fast-paced, run-and-gun shooter games would stupidly apply those same ideas to James Bond. Luckily, that’s not what happened. The majority of this game is based in stealth. And not just skulking around in vents or rooftops. I mean real espionage. Infiltrating, using gadgets, assassinating, traveling to exotic places, seducing women, and saving the world. That’s what 007 is all about!
On the Wii, no less. Not the place you’d typically think to go for serious shooters. I’m assuming that Nintendo still had the rights to this property and didn’t want to do it themselves. Since Rare was out of the picture, why not hand the reins to Activision? They know how to make shooters, right? I can’t deny that.
What they (Activision and Eurocom) don’t really know is how to make a shooter for the Wii. And quite frankly, they did a bad job with the motion controls. Of course you have to aim the Wii Remote at the screen to aim your weapon. But when the remote aims off-screen, the gun in-game reverts to the center of the screen and you lose control of your weapon. You’d think aiming the Wii Remote off screen to the left or right would let 007 turn around really fast, but no. Turning is a pain with motion controls.
Most of the time I’d play without motion controls. Even though the button layouts for the Classic Controller and Gamecube Controller are all very unnatural. A lot of my friends who don’t play Wii games very much had a tough time adjusting when we tried out the multiplayer. Regardless, we had a helluva time playing together on split-screen.
Boring environments and character models don’t stop GoldenEye for Wii from being a quality offline experience. The customization is all there. The huge cast of James Bond characters are all present and accounted for. Golden Gun mode is exciting to play in any of the very well-designed, tight maps provided here. Though you might see some frame rate hiccups here and there.
In the end, it’s not hard to say whether the Wiimake of GoldenEye really lives up to the 1997 original. It doesn’t. It doesn’t revolutionize or create anything new at all. It’s just a modernization. A do-over. It’s a revamp in light of all the changes that shooters have undergone over the years. 
Categories: Reviews
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