GoldenEye: Rogue Agent Multiplayer Hands-On

If you're going to make a game with the GoldenEye name on it, there are a few things you absolutely have to include. You need a charismatic main character (check), a globe-trotting storyline with lots of dastardly villains and international intrigue (check), and an extensive multiplayer mode with a grip of maps, plenty of diverse weapons, and a lot of gameplay options. Thankfully, in the upcoming GoldenEye: Rogue Agent from Electronic Arts' LA studio, that last one's looking like a check too. We recently sat down with a near-final build of the game and ran through a number of the included multiplayer maps--both offline and on--to get a feel for the competitive gaming on offer in the impending spy shooter.

The original GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 became popular on the basis of its involving single-player campaign, but it remained popular for a long time after its release because of its four-player, split-screen mode. Needless to say, Rogue Agent will support the same mode on all three consoles, providing you with plenty of replay value after you've plowed through the story mode. Perhaps more importantly, in this day and age, the game will also feature online competitive support on the PS2 and Xbox for up to eight players.

The game will ship with a number of multiplayer modes, such as standard deathmatch; domination, which is a Battlefield-style mode where teams vie for possession of control points that are scattered around the map; and tug-of-war, which has two teams trying to move a bomb that's set on a track to the designated end of the map. Rather than picking up the bomb, however, you'll move it by hitting switches along the track that transfer it to the next point. We only got to try deathmatch in our demo of the game, though even that mode offered a good deal to get a handle on.

Maps are always an important element of a competitive first-person shooter, and in a James Bond-themed game, the unique locations always have ways of taking on lives of their own. This makes the maps in Rogue Agent doubly important, because they have to provide thoughtful design and smooth flow for the gameplay while maintaining the character that fans of the 007 milieu will look for. Toward achieving that end, the designers have taken quite a few of the game's multiplayer locations straight from many classic Bond films, adding special gameplay elements to each one that will enhance it for multiplayer play. You can look forward to fighting among the Pyramids of Giza, where Bond fought against Jaws, as well as atop the satellite dish from the memorable, climactic battle in GoldenEye, to name just a couple of maps we haven't gotten a firsthand look at yet.

In our previous coverage of the game, we've reported on the Moonraker levels you'll find in Rogue Agent. In our most recent demo, we got to take a look at several other levels taken from the movies (as well as a few original ones). One of the most impressive we saw was set atop the Golden Gate Bridge, and it re-created the classic scene from A View to a Kill. Yes, that's on top of the bridge, not just on the bridge. As you'd expect, all manner of precarious pitfalls were available on this map to force our opponents through--though we ourselves could do the same if we weren't careful.

As reported previously, death traps will play a big part in Rogue Agent's multiplayer. These switch-activated hazards will let you use the environment to eliminate your foes from afar, and we saw some pretty nasty ones in the Golden Gate level. A blimp overhead would spray down the outdoor area with machine gun fire if we hit a switch up on the catwalk, and this fire would even set off some explosives on the main walkway between the two control towers. Other switches would open up large trapdoors in the level's walkways that would send us plummeting hundreds of feet to our doom in the traffic below. We discovered firsthand that in the hands of an experienced player, these death traps can be highly effective--and more than a little vexing.

We also got to see a map called Carver's Printing Press (taken from Tomorrow Never Dies), which featured a small, symmetrical design that seemed suited to one-on-one battles. A large press in the middle of the map would slam down every few seconds, making travel between the two halves difficult. Machinery on either side could be electrocuted here, zapping anyone within range. However, two small air ducts on the sides of the map provided some extra cover, as well as a less dangerous way through the middle barrier.

A third map was set in Francisco Scaramanga's funhouse, which fans will remember from The Man with the Golden Gun. This level featured one amazingly frustrating section in which the walls were a solid black, and doorways were outlined in simple yellow. As a result, it was essentially impossible to quickly differentiate the fake doorways from the real ones. Other areas had replicas of a cowboy or Al Capone (both equipped with very real, switch-activated guns). A third area contained a pit filled with retractable spikes and a number of power-ups. Naturally, a switch on the walkway above would extend the spikes, thus impaling anybody foolish enough to be in the pit at the wrong time.

Most of the maps in the game will feature some manner of these death traps, which ought to give the multiplayer a pretty hectic feel (at least from our experience). One original location we saw had a number of huge horizontal presses constantly slamming back and forth, giving us nary a moment's peace as we tried to evade our opponents. However, another new map, called Midas Showdown, didn't feature any substantial death traps; instead, it concentrated on a small, tightly focused competitive experience for a small number of players. If anything, it seems like Rogue Agent's maps will offer a substantial amount of variety, depending on what kind of competitive match you're looking for.

Come Packing

Of course, no good multiplayer mode is complete without a host of weapons to slaughter your friends with, and Rogue Agent's cache is right up there. Most of the guns you'll find in the multiplayer originate in the single-player campaign, and one or two are even important to the game's storyline. In a deathmatch, though, you won't care which supervillains are squabbling over whose prototype doomsday rifle, because you'll be too busy fragging.

Though around 14 weapons will be on offer in Rogue Agent's multiplayer, you won't be able to tote them around all at once like some Herculean superman. You'll start with your trusty pistol and a couple of grenades, and in the same fashion as many latter-day competitive shooters, you'll only be able to carry two extra weapons at once. Or, in the case of the few heavy weapons, you'll only get one at a time. Following from this, one of the most important aspects of the competitive play in Rogue Agent is the ability to dual-wield light weapons. Any two one-handed weapons can be combined to rain a torrent of death upon your enemy, which we experienced both sides of firsthand while we played the game.

Among the many light weapons are a Desert Eagle, a modified P-90 submachine gun, a shotgun, a poison injector that drastically slows a target's movement, a railgun that can shoot through walls, and a remote detonator pistol that lets you stick an explosive projectile to any surface--including your opponent. Certain weapons will naturally go together (kinda like chocolate and peanut butter) to form especially lethal combinations. The poison gun and the railgun, for instance, provide a nice complement to each other. Basically, if you can slow down your foe, you can then obliterate him or her with ease, because the railgun always kills with one hit. Even if you're just unleashing a withering hail of lead with the P-90 and the shotgun, for example, the dual-wielding ability is the key to victory.

But then, there are times when you have to go for the big guns, literally. There will, of course, be a rocket launcher--though you only get three rockets and you'll have to watch out for the considerable splash damage that comes from them. There's also a minigun that we found especially useful for quickly mowing down opponents, but carrying this heavy mother will really reduce your movement speed. The assault rifle features a zoom-in mode and delivers a heavy rate of fire. Finally, there's the OMEN experimental rifle, which fires a burst of pretty blue light that happens to vaporize any organic material on contact. Needless to say, you'll want to stay out of its way.

Sometimes, you won't want to use any weapons--except your own fists, that is. In the single-player game, you'll have substantial melee abilities that will allow you to punch and stun an enemy and then grab him, opting to either throw him down to the ground or drag him around as necessary. In the multiplayer, this melee ability has been tweaked a little bit. You can still stun your foes by punching them, but you won't be able to throw them down, which ordinarily interrupts their gameplay for too long. You will be able to toss them straight over the edge of any bottomless pit, however. We thought this ability was pretty comical on the Golden Gate map (even when it happened to us).

In the single-player campaign, the game's namesake--your golden eye--plays a part not only as an important story element, but also as an essential gameplay feature as well. The special powers imparted by your eye will also come in quite handy in multiplayer, though sometimes in modified forms. All four eye powers will drain your store of energy to varying degrees, but the eye does recharge slowly, which keeps you from abusing your powers. The shield is perhaps the most important ability of your golden eye, because it immediately makes you impervious to damage for a few, short seconds while you make a hasty retreat. However, as a penalty, your eye is drained of almost all of its energy. The MRI vision ability lets you detect other players through walls, which is especially useful with the railgun, which can both shoot right through barriers and take out enemies. Since this gun has a delay before firing, however, this activity isn't as easy as it sounds. The EM hack ability allows you to temporarily mess with an opponent's weapon by rendering it wildly inaccurate or disabling it completely. Finally, the electromagnetic pulse lets you stun a foe for a few seconds, which is more than enough time for you to put a bullet between his or her eyes.

At this late stage of development, performance in the multiplayer portion of Rogue Agent looked pretty solid to us on the PS2. Of course, both split-screen and online modes present their own challenges in terms of resource management. So with multiple views on the same screen, you have to sacrifice some performance. Meanwhile, going over a network can introduce latency issues. We didn't have any lag problems at all while playing the game over our big fat Internet connection, and though the split-screen mode admittedly has to sacrifice a bit of graphical detail to maintain performance, things still looked good and ran pretty smoothly.

After our extensive demo of GoldenEye: Rogue Agent's deathmatch features, we'd say the game is coming correct to anybody who's looking for a fully featured competitive shooter on consoles this holiday season. Will this new game live up to the legacy left by its venerable forebear? We'll find out in just a few weeks when Rogue Agent ships in mid-November on all three consoles.