golden eye rogue agent

I have this game on PS2 and Xbox and I love it. It's one of my favorite 6th gen shooters. Even though it's flawed and while there are better console-exclusive shooters, I still go back to it on a regular basis because I just love the gameplay; it's a perfect blend of elegant simplicity (a la Halo), super powers, ragdolls, fun weapons, and challenging difficulty. It's difficulty scaling is totally wacked but that's what adds to it's appeal IMO. I beat Rogue Agent on normal difficulty once and it's one of my proudest gaming achievements. I've noticed that there's barely any difference in difficulty between the easy, normal and hard difficulty levels. My guess is that the developers had to meet deadlines so they didn't playtest it or forgot to add scripts to differentiate the difficulty levels or something.

Speaking of the developers, these are the same guys that made Trespasser, Medal of Honor, and Clive Barker's Undying, so they have an impressive resume to say they least, although I doubt any of the staff that worked on Trespasser worked on Rogue Agent, since they had been renamed and bought out by EA by this point, so it's highly unlikely. From what I've read EA has reduced this developer to designing multiplayer maps for the Battlefield series, basically the same fate with what Activision has done with Raven Software, another excellent FPS developer that got bought out by a crappy publisher. Always sad to see publishers waste the talents of good devs on trivial assignments like multiplayer maps.

Goldeneye Rogue Agent isn't Perfect. I love the stuff I already mentioned like the weapons, powers, ragdolls, and the later levels as well as the huge amount of unlockable content like multiplayer maps, art gallery, etc. The length of the game is pretty substantial, too, and I've heard great things about the multiplayer mode even though I never got a chance to try it. But there are several areas where the game falls short like the linear level design, stealth not being an option, the story feeling like fan-faction, and certain weapons like the longbow being single-player exclusive which I never understood. I also don't like the lack of bot support in the multiplayer mode, and it would've been nice to have better/more cheat codes.

Still, despite its flaws I think Rogue Agent is definitely an underrated game considering it's universally considered one of the worst games to use the James Bond license, and you certainly wouldn't have to pay much to pick up a copy. I bought my PS2 copy for $3 and my Xbox copy for $5. Not bad for a shooter that offers so much content. And hey, at least its not a blatant re-skin like the slew of Bond games Activision pooped out that came in the wake of EA losing the Bond license.