GoldenEye 007 Review

Before GoldenEye 007, the received wisdom said first-person shooters needed a mouse and licensed games were shovelware. Rare demolished both ideas at once. The campaign's masterstroke is its objective design: higher difficulties do not just toughen enemies, they add whole new mission goals, turning the Facility or the Train into different puzzles each time. Location-based hit reactions, usable body armor, and enemies who flinch, stumble, and sound alarms gave console shooting a tactility nothing had matched.

Then there is the four-player split-screen deathmatch, a late addition that became the whole reason many people owned a Nintendo 64, with Oddjob bans negotiated like treaties. The visuals were foggy and the frame rate wheezed even in 1997, and the plot is competent Bond pastiche, but the mission structure and multiplayer were so far ahead that the genre spent years catching up to a movie tie-in.