PS3 Review – GoldenEye 007: Reloaded

Nostalgia is a big part of the gaming industry and gamers themselves, as people always tend to talk about the good old days and those games they played for hours and hours as a child. When Activision announced that it was bringing GoldenEye 007 to the PS3 and Xbox 360, a lot of us out there, including myself, were tickled pink at this news, remembering back to the old Nintendo 64 and a certain secret agent who stole our hearts. Now, 14 years after the original released, Activision has given us GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, with the big question being, how far can nostalgia take this game?

In this remake, Daniel Craig takes over the role of 007, as he is out to face off against Russians, helicopters, tanks, and whatever else you can think to throw at him. Thankfully, you have a phone that can do anything short of make you a sandwich, and you are trained in the use of weapons and hand-to-hand combat. The story is interesting enough to push across the story and provides you with enough to make it feel all spy-like.

GoldenEye is a game that feels a bit dated in terms of the gun play and combat, which is both a good thing and a bad. The good part is that it feels very similar to the original, bringing back those good times many of us had. However, this also leaves it on the outside looking in, when it comes to shooters you have to play. This is an FPS that works and is fun, but doesn’t have anything extremely special or memorable with the campaign to bring you back for more, aside from the extra hard difficulty, which takes away health regeneration and such. The campaign will run you around 7-10 hours and each mission has a main objective and side objectives to complete, giving each level a bit of depth, despite the completely linear level designs.

Aside from the single player, there are also MI6 missions to take part in. These missions have various objectives, such as defend certain points from onslaughts of enemies or kill every enemy in the map. Each mission lets you customize the difficulty points for competition, as you can select how much health you have, how many enemies, and more. These missions do a great job of complementing the main campaign and should give for plenty of extra hours worth of gameplay, trying to get the best score on each one.

Online and offline multiplayer make an appearance as well, with 4-player split-screen or 16-player online matches. There are tons of different modes to enjoy in the online part of the game, but sadly almost every mode except for one or two are dead. Even when you do get in a game though, the multiplayer aspect of the game is rather weak, with poor level designs and a rather boring feel to the game. Shotguns are far too overpowering, with people killing from ridiculous distances and the RPG is whored more than a blonde bombshell on the streets. There is also a ton of lag to be found in almost every game I played, with my character stuttering around the map a bit too much when trying to run.

The game also implements motion controls with the PlayStation Move, along with the sharpshooter, but I found myself not really enjoying the motion controls as, even after I tweaked them, the controls felt incredibly stiff and delayed, so I constantly switched back to the regular DualShock 3 controller, which felt a lot better. This might be something that works better with the sharpshooter, but I would recommend forgetting the game has motion controls and stick to the good old two sticks approach.

On the audio side, GoldenEye does a great job but has a few quirks here and there. The voice acting is well done and the guns sound good, but the audio is a bit on the low-end and there is not an option for subtitles, which could have gone a long way in this game. Most of the time I had to jack up my volume to even hear what the characters were saying, something that could have easily been avoided. Aside from that little quirk, the audio part of the game is top-notch and does a great job of putting you in the action.

Visually, the game is just OK and that is about the best you can say for it. The character models are uninspiring and the detail to most of the environments are rather weak. Bland corridors over and over again litter each level, with not enough detail paid to the world surrounding Bond. Thankfully, the guns found in the game look good, and add at least some polish to a boring product visually.

In the end, Reloaded is a game that doesn’t do enough to win over gamers who never played the classic and for those who fell in love with this N64 classic, you might be better off wiping that dust off your old N64 console. The game feels like it was stuck in the middle of modernizing the experience too much and sticking true to the roots, opting to stay around the middle. The single player campaign is fun and the MI6 missions provided some added depth, just don’t expect much from the games online multiplayer, which is already dead just a week after launch. If you have a few friends over, the 4-player co-op will provide for a lot of fun, but its hard to recommend this game when you have the big three’s on the market in Uncharted 3, Battlefield 3, and Modern Warfare 3.

PlayStation LifeStyle’s Final Score



+/ Enjoyable Single Player and MI6 Missions

– Lots of Online Modes Don’t Hide Boring Multiplayer

– Ugly game from Player Models to Environments

5 out of 10

TRENDING