Agent 64: Spies Never Die

After over half a decade in development, Agent 64: Spies Never Die is finally seeing its full release. I remember seeing this game in its early stages and being very excited to watch it progress. Perfect Dark and GoldenEye are two of my favourite shooters of all time, so finally seeing an indie title try to emulate that style was incredibly appealing. There are far too many Boomer Shooter imitations out there – what we really need is a Bond Shooter or two! After all this time though, can the game live up to its very high expectations? I’m certainly excited to find out! Many thanks to the developer for the review code. THE NAME’S WALTER, JOHN WALTER Secret Agent John Walter may not be James Bond or Joanna Dark, but he’s got a job to do, and that job is to save the world from his arch-nemesis, Dominic Pulp. Alongside his daughter, Dana, he’ll find himself fighting through nightclubs, temples, skyscrapers, and much more. It’s a real globe-trotting adventure that stays mostly grounded, albeit with a few science fiction elements creeping in as the plot develops. Anyone who has played any of Rare’s shooters (or the TimeSplitters series, for that matter) should have a general idea of how the game plays. Across fourteen individually playable stages, you’re tasked with completing a series of objectives before you can exit the mission. There are no lives, checkpoints, or even health pick-ups, so failure or death means starting the mission all over again. It’s pretty punishing for gamers more acclimatised to modern conveniences, but the levels are just the right length to make replaying them feel like less of a hassle. Once you know what you have to do, where you have to go, and where enemies are positioned, losing 15 minutes of progress will probably only take a few minutes to recover (hopefully with more health). As with GoldenEye, the enemy AI is both intelligent and simultaneously rather dumb. They’ll run off to trigger alarms, stagger and clutch their limbs when shot, and roll in an attempt to avoid getting hit, but they’ll also call their mates and run to your position, making it easy to exploit their brashness as you funnel them into another room. And you’ll need to take advantage of that AI too, as the higher difficulties really push you to your limits. Enemies become far more accurate and aggressive, they deal obscene amounts of damage, and the additional objectives send you into areas of the map that were previously inaccessible. It’s a smart choice to block these areas off on the lower difficulties, as it prevents you from wandering around wondering where the hell you’re supposed to go. That can still happen on occasion, but the briefing screen provides enough clues to point you in the right direction. I also appreciate the variety of objectives on offer, even if the protection missions can be particularly punishing on the higher difficulties. In addition to the campaign, which can be played in single-player or co-operatively, the game also features a Challenge mode that pits you against bots in progressively more difficult pre-set scenarios, along with an Arena mode that acts as the game’s multiplayer. Here you can choose between the game’s main modes, maps, available weapons, number of bots, teams, and even gameplay modifiers. In the current era of gaming, where multiplayer customisation is often surprisingly limited, it feels incredibly refreshing, especially as it lets you save your presets if you find one that’s particularly fun. Better yet, the game’s core movement and mechanics genuinely capture the feel of those N64 shooters, making every match an absolute blast. It’s perfect for old-school gamers like me who just don’t gel with the modern era of multiplayer games. We’ve been waiting a long time for an indie game that truly captures the essence of Rare’s N64 shooters, and Agent 64: Spies Never Die pretty much hits all of those beats perfectly across both its single-player and multiplayer offerings. There’s just one problem that holds the game back for me, and it’s a big one: the absolutely abysmal campaign progression system. How it works is that the game is divided into four acts, each containing three or four stages. Completing a level on Agent difficulty earns you one Cypher Point, Special Agent earns you two, and the hardest difficulty, 64 Agent, grants you three. To access the next act, you need to accumulate a certain number of points. Unfortunately, the game decides to set the requirements so high that even completing every level on the medium difficulty isn’t enough to unlock the final act. As such, you’ll either need to complete stages on the hardest difficulty for extra points, or replay them and find the hidden mask to unlock the challenging stage challenge for another way to earn points. Both of which are pretty hard going and will require you to acquire a certain degree of mastery in the game, which makes playing the final act on Agent feel completely superfluous. By the time you’ve unlocked it, you’ll probably be good enough to consider yourself a pro, so what’s the point in playing on anything less than Hard? It’s a baffling decision that makes working through the story far more of a chore than it should be. The extra objectives on the harder difficulties and the unlockable cheats (gameplay modifiers that can be used in both single-player and multiplayer) should already be enough to encourage people to replay stages again and again. This system was good enough to make GoldenEye and Perfect Dark incredibly replayable, but here it made me enjoy the game less and not want to return, due to having to chisel my way through the story campaign at a snail’s pace. Is this enough to stop me recommending the game? Not really. But it does mean I recommend it with a degree of caution.