New Steam Game Is For All You GoldenEye And Perfect Dark Sickos

Over the last few years, we’ve received a number of retro “boomer shooter” games inspired by classics like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D. And many of these games are great. But for some, the FPS games they have fond memories of lived on an N64, featured auto-aim, and played very differently from what was happening on PC in the late 90s and early 2000s.

These are the people who will love Agent 64: Spies Never Die, a newly released FPS that plays and looks a lot like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. 

Out now on PC, Agent 64 doesn’t try to hide what it is. The very first room you spawn into in the game’s first campaign level contains a TV and a console connected to it that looks a lot like an N64. On the screen, a fuzzy gameplay image that could be Agent 64, or could be GoldenEye 007, if you squint hard enough. And the rest of Agent 64 is openly designed to recapture the feel of playing Rare’s N64 shooters.

You won’t be aiming down the sights here or bunnyhopping around levels at a million miles per hour. Instead, like Rare’s classic N64 FPS games, Agent 64 uses auto aim and lacks a crouch or jump button. You walk, quickly, everywhere in Agent 64, sliding around levels like you’re exploring them while riding on one of those cheap (and dangerous) hoverboards that were popular for a bit. It doesn’t play at all like most other boomer shooters, which challenge the player to be accurate and fast. Instead, Agent 64 lets you flow through levels, releasing flurries of bullets until the enemy you’re shooting makes the right grunt noise and flops over dead.

With its simple controls and absence of upgrades or unlocks, it’s not a very deep combat system. But solo developer Replicant D6 has truly nailed the smooth feel of Rare’s classic shooters. There’s something incredibly satisfying about sliding into a room with a few guards and effortlessly taking them out using the game’s auto-aim and fast-firing SMG. It makes you feel so cool. So badass.

But what helped make Perfect Dark and GoldenEye true classics was also each game’s level design and the way that different difficulty options added more objectives.

And once again, Replicant D6 nails this key part of those N64-era shooters. Playing through levels on the lowest difficulty helps you get a feel for what to expect. Ramping up the difficulty unlocks new areas and challenges, such as blowing up supplies or using a gadget to hack a computer or track a helicopter before lift-off. It adds a lot of replayability to each level, and I enjoyed going back through missions multiple times on each difficulty, trying to complete them faster and also looking out for some of the sneaky collectibles hidden around that can be shot to unlock extras and other levels.

©Replicant D6

And yes, Agent 64 contains multiplayer, arguably the thing that turned Perfect Dark and GoldenEye into beloved shooters that are still fondly remembered decades later. You can play various multiplayer modes with tweakable settings against bots, other players online, or a mix of both. There’s also full co-op support, too, including online and split-screen options that let you and a buddy play through the campaign together on one computer screen. Or four players on one screen in multiplayer matches.

I primarily played Agent 64 on my Steam Machine, and it was a perfect, flawless experience. This is the kind of game that really demands a controller. But if you prefer mouse and keyboard, Agent 64 fully supports it, and it plays great. I just prefer sticks and triggers for these kinds of auto-aim shooters of old.

And if you want a really old-school feel, you can turn off some of the fancier graphics options and even activate a CRT filter to make Agent 64 more closely resemble the N64 shooters it’s emulating. Even with all the fancy visuals turned on, this is still a very retro-looking shooter that matches how I remember GoldenEye and Perfect Dark looking, even if directly comparing them to this new game makes it clear we all have some rose-tinted memories of what games looked like back then.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die likely won’t appeal much to people who didn’t grow up playing and loving the N64 shooters it was inspired by. I never enjoyed those games much back in the day, but once I played them via emulation and remasters, where they ran a lot better, I found them to be quite charming and fun shooters. For those who do hold some fondness in their hearts for those games and crave a new (but not too new) FPS that plays like those classics, Agent 64 is a damn good time that won’t break the bank and will run on basically any PC released in the last decade. Can’t ask for much more than that.