PC REVIEW | Agent 64 Spies Never Die

Depending on what year you were born, you may not know this, but the Nintendo 64 was home to some of the best shooters ever made, even by today’s standards. GoldenEye and Perfect Dark are the most prominent shooters throughout gaming history, and went on to inspire countless studios to make their projects. Growing up with a Nintendo 64 allowed me to appreciate just how good gaming was back then. You didn’t need a subscription, you could literally invite your friends over and 4-player split-screen the night away having tons of fun with things like big head mode, golden gun mode, and just enjoy the social aspect of gaming.

Agent 64 has set out to capture that nostalgia, and let me tell you, Replicant D6 has done a fantastic job at capturing what made GoldenEye and Perfect Dark so great.

Things I liked!

• The Music | Music is fantastic, with it perfectly capturing that lo-fi, ’90s retro spy-thriller aesthetic. GoldenEye 64 was always admired for its soundtrack (especially the pause menu), and Agent 64 has clearly remembered just how important it is. Action set pieces are filled with energetic synth tracks, and espionage levels are filled with a more subtle focus on ambience. The music isn’t just slapped on, it makes sense, and fits each scene well.

• The Gunplay | What would a first-person shooter be without fantastic gunplay? Well, Agent 64 has it all. Gunplay is satisfying, punchy, and feels good when aiming. Replicant D6 has done a fantastic job at capturing the GoldenEye 64 gameplay mechanics perfectly here, so if you are a fan of the source material, you will love blasting your way through each level. There are many different weapon types to choose from, including melee options, although I will say, melee didn’t really play any part in the story for me except the museum level, where it is forced on you until later on. Other than that, expect to see shotguns, pistols, magnums, rocket launchers, machine guns, and even tools and gadgets to use at your disposal.
  
  
• Nostalgia Blast | For those familiar with the source material, GoldenEye 64 and Perfect Dark, you will be right at home. Every aspect of these games has been captured, right from the UI, the models, the lighting, how the dialogue is handled, and even the music feels right at home here. I honestly loved seeing the extremely low-poly models with photographic faces. It took me back to my Nintendo 64 days, and you can tell that they were deeply in love with that era.
  
  
• Level Design | Levels feel great, with the right length being taken into consideration. Some first-person shooters feel overinflated and rushed with a distinct lack of consistency. Agent 64 takes a very simple approach that is very linear, yet playing through on harder difficulties opens up new areas, and ways to achieve your objectives. Not only this, it also adds additional objectives so that it encourages you to explore more instead of mastering each level after a couple of tries. Enemy placement enhances the difficulty across the fifteen levels, with variants making certain locations challenging. For example, in the museum level, there are black coats who do more damage, and have more health. They also carry better weapons.
  
  
• Online Co-op | There is so much content here to engage with that it was honestly overwhelming at times. You have the traditional story campaign, which comes with fifteen levels, and at the time of writing, a “coming soon” icon which promises more single player story content. But if that isn’t enough for you, there are split-screen local co-op which you can play with a friend, or use Steam’s Remote Play Together feature. But if you have multiple copies of the game, you can run co-op campaign with no split screen, and run around guns blazing together. It’s insanely fun. If that isn’t enough, you also have online lobbies where you can play things like team deathmatch, and regular deathmatch, but since this was an early review copy, I couldn’t find any games to try this out. However, if you still want to blow off some steam, there are bot lobbies which give you the same options, but purely offline.
  
  
• Post-Launch Content | As mentioned above, there is extra content coming post-launch. When this will be, I have no idea, but it is great to see that the developer is promising more content later on when the game releases.
  
  
• Randomizers & Paradox Modes | If you are looking for more of a challenge, each level has a randomizer, along with a paradox mode that essentially adds twists to each level that you must be mindful of. These can limit you to pistol-only, enable big head mode which makes shooting a little easier, but ultimately it is just a new way to experience each level. These paradoxes can also be configured to be used online when setting up your deathmatches. You can make it so that there is pistol-only or automatics-only, and again, even add big head mode if you wish. It is a really fun spin on the game modes, yet also sticking to the source material. Sadly, no golden gun mode though!

Mixed & disliked!

• Enemy AI | At the time of writing, the enemy AI is a little lacklustre. There are many instances of me killing people loud or quiet, and the enemies being totally oblivious to it all. For example, in the mountain area, I ended up karate-chopping most of the guards who just lay there dead on the floor, with one guy walking over them like it was normal. Why doesn’t he go on alert? Why doesn’t he sound the alarm since the level has alarms in it to call for back-up? Does he really hate his colleagues that much?

• Co-op Bugs | I really enjoyed playing through the campaign in co-op with James, but one issue we had when using in-game voice chat was that your voice location stays where you died. Meaning you can no longer chat to your teammate when you watch them run off to complete the rest of the mission. It creates a certain level of awkwardness when playing online. At first both of us thought the audio had just broken, but when James came running back he could hear me again. I personally hope this gets fixed before launch.

• How long did I play the review before publishing? 18 hours
• How long to beat the story? 4 Hours
• How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? No achievements at time of writing
• How long to get 100%? | 20 hours
• You’ll love this game if you like these | Golden Eye, Perfect Dark, Shadows of the Empire

Score: 90/100

Agent 64 is an almost perfect game. It offers some of the most satisfying gunplay in recent releases, despite drawing from games of the late nineties. Gameplay is addictive and offers more features than games with expensive budgets.

Aaron

Gaming is in my blood.  Be it handheld games, Xbox, PC, Switch or Playstation, I am all over it.
I make my own games as part of my profession and love playing co op games with friends in my spare time. Avid dog lover and camper van enthusiast.