Agent 64: Spies Never Die Review: I Wish I Was in College Again | The Gamerheads Podcast

Platform reviewed: PC (Steam)

Price: $21.64

I’ll admit it. I’m not the biggest fan of GoldenEye. I didn’t own an N64. I moved on to PlayStation at that time. I did play quite a bit of GoldenEye, though. I was in college when the game was released, and there were always dorm rooms full of people playing to determine who was the best at the game. I just never got used to the N64 controller.

Then I played Perfect Dark recently. I hate to say it, but I wasn’t a fan of that game either. The controls felt slow and clunky to me.

So here I am, playing Agent 64: Spies Never Die. I was afraid the game would feel the same: good game, just not for me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. God, I wish I was in college again.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die takes inspiration from GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. The first-person view, the visuals, the level layouts, even the weird polygon faces. But it does one thing that makes the game much more enjoyable for me: it incorporates modern gaming features.

To start with, the controls feel so much better. My character runs much faster and responds much better to my inputs. Aiming and firing at enemies feels great. Everything I expect in a modern first-person shooter is present in this game. Sure, it may be inspired by GoldenEye, but it’s built for modern gaming.

I love that there is multiplayer in this game. Running through the levels is so much more fun with friends. Exploring and discovering secrets were some of the best moments I had playing multiplayer.

One of the features in Agent 64 is speedrunning a level to see if I can complete the mission under a certain time limit. I’m not a speedrunner by any means, but this game had me hooked on running the same mission over and over to see if we could beat the clock. Every time we missed the time, we’d talk about what we were going to do differently on the next run. It required real teamwork. Strategy. It was a lot of fun.

The game features three different difficulty levels: Agent, Special Agent, and 64 Agent. Each difficulty has different objectives and new areas to explore. The higher the difficulty, the more challenging the objectives become. This encourages replayability, and because the game is already a lot of fun, it’s a welcome feature.

There are some fun moments in the game as well that had me cheering with my friends. Taking out a helicopter with rocket launchers while running around and dodging its attacks will never get old. We also discovered that you can mess up a mission if you destroy the computers you’re supposed to hack. It was a fun experiment that had us laughing, even though we had to start the level all over again.

There are also player-versus-player matches that support up to eight players. There are several different modes: Deathmatch, which has you scoring points for each kill; Briefcase, which gives you points for holding the briefcase; and Zone, which has you capturing different zones on a map.

I know player-versus-player matches were one of the big reasons GoldenEye was such a hit, and I’m glad they added these modes to the game. But I’m not really competitive, so I didn’t explore this part of the game very much.

There is a story in the game. Unfortunately, this is one of those games where I just wanted to jump in and do missions, so I didn’t really pay much attention to it. I find that when I play multiplayer games like this, I tend to skip the story and just play with my friends.

For me, the real storytelling comes from the moments we create together. We reminisce about the runs we had and talk about all the epic moments that happened along the way.

Final Grade: A

Agent 64: Spies Never Die takes inspiration from the classic first-person shooters like Golden Eye and Perfect Dark and improves on them, incorporating modern gaming features like smoother controls and online gaming. Playing co-op and running through the missions were some of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve had. For those that are competitive, there are also player vs player matches. I may not have fallen in love with GoldenEye in college, but Agent 64: Spies Never Die gave me the experience I sorely missed out on.

Review code provided by Stride PR.