I’d had my eyes on Agent 64 for some time, as I expected it to attempt a modern-day indie version of GoldenEye. Instead, it’s a game that tries to just be GoldenEye, as it has little interest in updating or improving upon the game it blatantly does its best to copy. If you don’t have a high fondness for that game, you’re not going to like this one, but if you just wanted an uninspired but competent clone, then this will likely do the trick.
I have to mention first and foremost that I’ve never played a PC first-person shooter where the aiming feels as wonky as it does here. This is because, in the name of authenticity, Agent 64 has purposefully limited the aiming in order to make it feel similarly clunky to the games it apes. As you can imagine, this means the game doesn’t necessarily feel great, and it’s designed to be played with autoaim.
Modern design conventions are mostly thrown out the window here. Missions have no checkpoints, so if you die you have to restart from the beginning. Granted, the 14 missions here (even fewer than GoldenEye) are all under 10 minutes long so this isn’t a giant deal.
The Enemy AI varies between completely braindead and wizardry, as they’ll stand stock still while bullets fly in front of them and not react to the corpses of their comrades, but they can snipe you with inaccurate weapons from half a world away through the barest openings on higher difficulties. The devs really tried to make almost everything like it was in the 90s.
If you’ve played GoldenEye or Perfect Dark with a mouse and keyboard, you’ll find all of this considerably worse for the most part, as the fine aiming with a controller is even worse than it was in those games. The texture and model quality is also all over the place, with some clearly being low-resolution in a way similar to N64 games and other aspects looking far more modern.
The real sticking point here, though, is that the level design simply can’t compare with the classics. There’s very little unique personality on display, as the level design doesn’t feel nearly as lived-in and coherent as the classics, and levels can often devolve into linear shooting galleries. Agent 64 tries its best to mimic those games without quite understanding them.
This is exacerbated on the highest difficulty, where enemies are lightning quick and incredibly precise, which is simply annoying to manage with the game’s intentionally archaic aiming. I played through the whole game on the first and second difficulties but mostly haven’t bothered with the third, as it’s just incredibly frustrating and based around a combination of memorization and luck. Some sections can seem borderline impossible to do without taking tons of damage, too.
In the end, I do have to give the game credit for sticking to its guns and achieving almost exactly what it set out to do. This game is absolutely almost identical to GoldenEye, warts and all. It can even be pretty fun once you adjust to its less-than-stellar controls and odd choices. So, even when frustration mars things a bit, there’s a satisfaction to learning its levels and fighting its throngs of mindless foes that I can’t deny.
Verdict
I’m admittedly torn on Agent 64. Looking at it through a modern lens, it’s a frustratingly dated experience that will take some serious patience at times. However, that’s also exactly what it was going for. If you love GoldenEye and want a game that mostly aims to copy it, you’ll probably at least like Agent 64 reasonably well. Anyone else will likely want to skip this one.
