GE: Reloaded is yet another lazy and derivative word for word recitation of the Call Of Duty bible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVezZw8iTkw
Last year's BloodStone was a breath of fresh air for the James Bond franchise. It was a fun, varied and cinematic game that felt true to it's source material. But best of all, it wasn't another lazy attempt to mooch off of the Goldeneye brand's success.
Goldeneye Reloaded, on the other hand, makes no effort to hide the fact that it wants to feed on your nostalgia. It is on an unapologetic quest to milk the franchise until the last drop falls into Bobby Kotick's gluttonous gaping hole of a mouth.
Instead of releasing an HD-ified version of the N64 edition, which would've been easier, cheaper, and a hell of a lot more profitable, Activision decided it would be better to port the Wii edition of Goldeneye to current generation consoles. In short, Reloaded is little more than a word for word recitation of the Call Of Duty bible.
The game loosely follows the events of the movie of the same name, replacing much of the story with fire fights and Pierce Brosnan and friends for the Daniel Craig era collective. It's basically about Bond's quest to stop an electromagnetic weapon from being used, it's chock-full of betrayal, plot twists and stereotypical Russian bad guys. All in all, it's told in quite a messy and convoluted manner. People who haven't seen the movie will probably have a hard time understanding – let alone caring about the story here. Regardless, it was cool to see Eurocom's adaptations of memorable locations from the movie and N64 game in glorious HD. Speaking of HD, this game is an excellent port. Minus a handful of bugs, the game runs great and looks very nice. They've added a new lighting system, more NPC's and better particle effects, all of which were impossible to do on a Wii. This is how a port should be done, remake the engine from scratch so it can accommodate each systems strengths and weaknesses.
None of this matters if the gameplay doesn't hold up – and Goldeneye Reloaded's gameplay is a derivative mound of maggot infested fecal matter. The game plays just like any other COD inspired first person shooter on the market. You run around in a congregation of linear environments from Checkpoint A to Checkpoint B, shooting bad guys and ducking for 2 seconds to heal after getting shot. Occasionally, you'll also shoot locks and All of this is packed tightly into a collection of heavily scripted events because god forbid we give players a small amount of freedom to traverse about the area at their heart's desire, they might get lost! Just in case, Eurocom was kind enough to provide us with a mini map, thereby circumventing the dangers of traveling through the malignant maze that is a straight line and a left turn.
All of this doesn't necessarily make a terrible game though. After all, I enjoyed the likes of Resistance 2, which commits many of the same crimes, thanks to it's solid gunplay. But Reloaded doesn't even to that right. The controls feel smooth enough, but every gun feels weak and entirely unsatisfying to use. They have about as much recoil and weight as an air soft gun and the shots don't connect with the enemies very well. They don't react to the barrage of bullets enter their skulls until they die. And when they die, they simply scream, fall into a stock position and disappear.
It also doesn't help that the NPCs are all a bunch of blundering dumbs**ts. They're passable enough in fire fights but they make the stealth frustratingly cheap. You can shoot a guy or subdue him and as long as you're crouched, the guy around the corner or even right behind him will be deaf to the silenced pistol's shot, his cries of pain and the thud of his corpse falling on the ground. Even worse, if you enter a firefight after being caught sneaking, all you have to do is crouch once everyone in the area has been killed to carry on to the next area undetected.
For the 5 to 8 hours it takes to see the end you'll have to endure nothing but the irksome gunplay sandwiched between a helping of exciting set pieces and Quick Time Events. There are two scenes in the game that offer a refreshing change of pace. The first is in the Barcelona nightclub where you must search for a specific person through a huge crowd of people with the smart phone, which was, coincidentally, also the only time the smartphone was used in an interesting way.
The other is in the second to last mission where you get to handle a tank in pursuit of the main villain. This scene introduced entirely new gameplay mechanics that were a lot of fun to use. This proved to be EXACTLY what the game needed, but unfortunately it was too little, too late.
There is one saving grace that bumps the game all the way up to mediocrity. This is the "Classic 007" difficulty level. In this mode, the regenerating health is replaced by two bars on each side of the screen, one represents health and the other shows armor. Health does not regenerate, there's not even a health pack in sight. Instead, you must traverse through the environments carefully, avioding firefights as often as possible and scavenge around for armor pickups. Despite the aforementioned linear nature of the game, the armor vests are cleverly hidden throughout the levels and can be quite difficult to spot.
When you're done with the single-player, you can jump into two other game modes. Mi6 ops and Multiplayer.
MI6 Ops is basically the same as Modern Warfare 2's Spec Ops mode with a lot customizable options. I never touch these modes unless they come with online co-op, and since this one doesn't, it's not really worth playing for more than a few minutes.
Finally, there's the multiplayer. The game supports up to 12 players, has a Call Of Duty type ranking system and lots of modes to choose from. There's the standard deathmatches, various objective game types and golden gun. The game is a ghost town in every mode except Golden Gun and from time to time Team Conflict. That's not at all surprising considering the plethora of superior multiplayer games that have been released at around the same time. Reloaded's multiplayer is actually it's best feature, but despite the fun I had killing people with the Golden Gun, it does nothing new. Everything here has been done a thousand times better 999 times before. And that can basically be applied to every other aspect of the game.