Agent 64: Spies Never Die review
The Goldeneye-alike highlights how much development has become about adapting older games rather than injecting new life into them — albeit in a fun and replayable shell.
Impressive, the labour put into Agent 64: Spies Never Die in order to recreate the sensation of playing a first-person shooter in the late-1990s. Not just in facsimile, but rendered instead from rose-tinted memories: neither *GoldenEye" nor Perfect Dark were this smooth. Dispiriting, though, what Agent 64 says about the lack of new ideas in many games beholden to the past.
Remakes and reboots have long been the pis-aller of a struggling games industry, but Agent 64 reads more like a lost sequel. Barely a screen of Agent 64 fails to conjure images of winters huddled around a Nintendo 64. You crawl through vents to stake out toilets, rush across snow-blanketed landscapes to sabotage communications, and infiltrate temples garlanded with futuristic technology as you battle well-dressed clones.
That should give an idea of how liberally Agent 64 borrows from GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. A few nods to John Wick and Timesplitters emerge along the way, as it traces the sparse story of John Walter, an aging spy who embarks on a mission to save his daughter and escort her around lavishly polygonal maps.
As with its predecessors, Agent 64 divides its levels into multiple difficulties, each with its own expanding list of objectives. From Timesplitters it borrows solo challenges that provide a runway into a slick, nostalgia-driven, multiplayer.
It's to Agent 64's credit that I was seized, throughout, by a sense of having been here before. Not just the familiar environs and objectives, but from how robust a recreation it is. Returning to GoldenEye and Perfect Dark in the midst of playing, I met something far more clunky and hard to handle than Agent 64 suggests they were. Replicant D6 has created a version of that past that is more forgiving, smoother, and more reasonable.
Where Agent 64 falters is where Replicant D6 attempts to add their own spin to things. Progression is locked by an in-game currency that feels out of place, which requires you to complete missions on higher difficulties in order to move through blocks of three-to-four levels. Some of this currency, "cyphers," can be obtained through contracts — challenges conducted in levels in which you find hidden masks — though those are locked behind an even more punishing difficulty curve.
Agent 64 is far from the first game I've played, even this week, that attempts to borrow wholesale from a source material and stumbles in attempts to differentiate itself. It is, at least, the most successful. If other upcoming nostalgic releases play like someone copying another's homework by changing a few words to mask it, Agent 64 does feel like a passionate recreation of the era from which it draws inspiration: history as rhyme, rather than repetition.
In evoking that period, it also evokes a time when play was driven by fun first. That is exactly what Agent 64 offers: a diverting, nostalgic, and deeply affectionate tribute. Even if Replicant D6's efforts to inject their own fingerprint upon the concept falter, the result remains a whole lot of fun.