Next up is not-SPECTRE headquarters in
an underwater lair called the Octopus, which sort of reminds me of
Stromberg's base from The Spy Who Loved Me. Other than that,
there's not much to say. The Octopus is just more of the same bland
tedium found in the rest of the game. By the next level, Goldfinger's
found out that Dr. No's home base is in Crab Key and dispatches
GoldenEye there to kill the doctor and target the island for an OMEN
strike. This is the only level that seems to open up into wide open
spaces as you brainlessly sludge your way through the docks, around
the mine, and finally into the base itself. There's two tanks
guarding the base's entry doors, but if you activate your
invincibility and sprint around them you can safely shoot rockets at
their backs since they can't turn around for some reason. The level
ends with a pretty good boss fight against Dr. No. Once he is dead,
Goldfinger, believing the rogue agent to be too powerful to control –
and revealing that he has plans to overthrow not-Blofeld to take over
not-SPECTRE – betrays GoldenEye and leaves him to die in the OMEN
strike. However GoldenEye manages to escape before the island is
destroyed.
With Scaramanga and Pussy's help, he
returns to the volcano lair (straight outta You Only Live Twice)
to confront Goldfinger. This is the final and most difficult level of
the game. Not only is it ungodly long, but it's also the only level
featuring the OMEN rifle. This weapon uses OMEN technology to fire
glowing blue thingees that kill in just one hit (or two if you've got
your invincibility shield active). The blue thingees can be dodged,
but it's very biased. OMEN wielding enemies fire their guns very
rapidly and if the blue thingees come anywhere near you you're dead.
However when you use the rifle (which can only fire 3 shots
before needing to reload, by the way) you don't get to fire rapidly,
reload times are slow, and the enemies always seem to dodge the
projectiles at a distance of anything more than 15 meters or so. My
tactics for this level avoided using the OMEN rifle and involved a
lot of hiding behind cover, a lot of grenade spamming, and very brief
and careful poking of my head out to shoot for brief seconds lest I
get hit by a stray OMEN blue glowing thingee. You have NPC allies at
certain points but they're useless; they die quickly and only serve
to momentarily distract the enemies.
So you forge ahead through so many
freakin' rooms, many of which are repeated multiple times. I
should also mention that while Rogue Agent does have a
checkpoint-respawn system, not all checkpoints are save points. So if
you try leaving the game in the middle of one of its ceaselessly long
levels, you may lose a bunch of progress when you come back. Finding
this out was not fun, believe me. Eventually you make it to this wide
round room with loads of badguys (including some OMEN gunners)
pouring out of multiple doors. Cover is sparse, ammo is out in the
open, enemies are constantly running around all over the place, and
you can't go back since the door behind you closes. Unless you stay
in the doorway and pick off badguys from afar (even this doesn't
accomplish much) there's nowhere to hide. Once you enter that room,
you're committed. I was stuck on this one room for over an hour
before I gave up, threw the game disc against the wall, and watched a
longplay on YouTube to see what I missed. It turns out that there's
only one hallway and one cutscene after this room. So yes, I didn't
fully beat the game but I did complete 99.9% of it. That much effort
is far more than this game deserved.
So after the hell room and
straightforward easy hallway following it, you reach some bulletproof
glass behind which Goldfinger makes his grand villain speech with the
OMEN by his side. Unbeknownst to him, GoldenEye (that is , the
player) has been using this moment to hack the OMEN and activate it,
killing the evil mastermind and his remaining henchman. Were you
expecting a final boss fight or something? What are you, crazy? Pussy
Galore picks up the agent in her helicopter and the two celebrate
with a victory shag. Little do they know that the events of this
whole game were part of not-Blofeld's plan and that he and Scaramanga
(who was in on it) will be keeping an eye on the rogue agent.
So that does it for the singleplayer
campaign and to sum it all up it's one of the most dreary and joyless
video games I ever forced myself to slog through (or at least 99.9%
of the way through). The plot is uninteresting, the enemies suck, and
the levels are obscenely long. What it needed – aside from the
aforementioned level design and gameplay variety – was a main
character who had a bit of personality. Never once throughout the
entire game, including cutscenes, does GoldenEye speak or even show
some character. He's an empty skull for the player to rent.
GoldenEye: Rogue Agent would've also benefited from a level in
which you could fight James Bond as a boss. How cool would that be?
As for multiplayer, I can't really say
all that much because I didn't play too much of it. There's two
reasons why. The first is that there's no bots, which is a real
letdown because multiplayer shooters are generally funner with more
opponents (plus previous 007 games did have bots). The second
is that the GoldenEye abilities, which are available in MP, take some
explaining/getting used to for players who haven't played the
singleplayer campaign – and let me tell you, I've never met anyone
else who played Rogue Agent's SP. Other than that, the
multiplayer is pretty average. There's few match types, the character
skins are dull, and the weapons are all the same as in SP. The most
noteworthy thing about this game mode is the maps which most 007 fans
may find rather interesting. There's maps based on Tomorrow Never
Dies, A View to a Kill, The Man With the Golden Gun,
and Moonraker, and a lot of them have traps that can be
activated on one's opponents.
And that's all there is to say about
GoldenEye: Rogue Agent; it's a very dull, very bland, very
colourless FPS that barely feels like it has anything to do with the
007 franchise. It's no wonder the game's box comes with a flashy “007
Presents:” sticker on it, just to remind you what it is. They even
took the name of the most popular 007 game ever – GoldenEye 64
– and slapped it on this one in a blatant cash-in attempt. It
doesn't work because this doesn't feel like a Bond game, nor does it
feel like a Bond villain game. It's a no name henchman simulator, a
wasted opportunity destined to be forgotten by all but the most
hardcore of Bond fan completionists. For everyone else, don't bother
with Rogue Agent.
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