Goldeneye No Time For Sweetness

Goldeneye No Time For Sweetness

Mention the words GoldenEye to gamers of a certain age and you are likely to find them waffling on about how a little N64 title is still one of the best games in the world. To be honest, they wouldn’t be far wrong, I never owned an N64 or GoldenEye, but I played it enough with friends to appreciate the immense quality of the game.

I am eternally disappointed that there was never a PC version of the game released, and considering the current limbo that the rights to the game are in, I don’t expect to see a retail reimagining of it on the PC any time soon.

Don’t fret though if you are looking for a top quality Bond fix, GoldenEye Source is the mod to sort you out. You will have to make do with multiplayer, the guys behind the mod haven’t delved into the singleplayer side of things yet, but I have to say that what they have done with multiplayer is brilliant.

So it is pretty much N64 GoldenEye with more players, more and tweaked game modes and achievements. There have been some gameplay tweaks to make it more suitable to the PC, namely aiming, a key part of GoldenEye gunplay. No longer do you stop while you aim, instead you can aim and move at a slow speed. If you want to master GoldenEye Source then you need to aim, I learnt that lesson the hard way.

As the mod is only in  the fourth stage of Beta, it is not quite feature complete. There are still more characters and maps from the original game to be added, yet you won’t really notice they aren’t there, the quality of the maps in the mod is exceptional. Some have been expanded slightly to suit new game modes and the increase in player numbers, but the changes feel right and add to the atmosphere of the mod.

The new game modes are great additions to the multiplayer environment. In Live and Let Die, Baron Samedi rules the roost. True to form, he can only be killed outright with the Golden Gun, if he is killed with any other weapon he respawns stronger. It makes for a unique game mode, although one that is perhaps outdone by GunGame. Based on a Counter Strike Source mod, when you get a kill you get a new weapon, less accurate and less powerful than the previous one, until you are left running around with a knife trying to get the final kill. When everyone else has a gun it’s extremely tense, and that makes victory all the sweeter.

It may not quite match the original version of the game, but it is great fun in its own right. If the team working on the mod can one day get a singleplayer mode complete, that would be the icing on the cake. If you want classic multiplayer action, GoldenEye Source is what you should play.

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