For decades people have revered Rare's N64 shooters, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. If anyone played games during that era, there's a high chance you have memories of playing split-screen multiplayer on one of them.

Now, a solo French developer who uses the moniker Replicant D6, has spent over five years crafting a love-letter to Rare's classic titles named Agent 64: Spies Never Die - a nostalgic blast from the past.

From the very moment the game launches, everything is a homage to the low poly shooters of the past. Menus play atmospheric music that perfectly hit the espionage motifs of Goldeneye on the N64, so much so, they could be interchangeable. This search for authenticity continues over to the control schemes. There is a modern dual stick camera and movement approach, or an old school one-to-one single stick movement option that mimics how these retro shooters played on the Nintendo 64's single stick controller.

But the most impactful feature is the ability to turn on or off lock-on aiming. Both options feel genuine to the experience I had when I played split-screen on the N64, as everyone playing tried to counter that one friend who screen cheated for easy kills.

Outside of control schemes, Agent 64 Spies Never Die has a expansive suite of game modes: a story campaign with side contracts, a challenge mode, and offline and online arenas. All featuring some form of co-operative or competitive multiplayer.

But as I do when I begin any shooter, I jumped into the campaign. Instantly, the low-poly, simple textured graphics, combined with the camera work felt like I was playing a brand new N64 shooter ripped from the late 90s, albeit with higher resolution textures, solid frame-rates, and modern lighting and fog effects. But everything else is a perfect homage: gun sway and melee chop animations feel spot-on and sound effects are era appropriate.

Unfortunately, while the gameplay and audiovisual presentation works, I felt Agent 64 would've benefitted from a stronger story. The story sees mature Secret Agent John Walter come under attack from a nefarious organisation. While it's a voiceless story told through subtitles, I found the writing to be one of the weaker elements, that focused on tropey archetypes.

Although, personally I would've liked a better story and characters, I realise most people don't play this kind of game for a deep narrative experience. It's more of a vehicle to visit different locations and try out the suite of weapons before jumping into the other modes. But I did appreciate how the briefings in the menu expanded on the objectives and the 3D models showed weapons and gear in more detail.

Agent 64's story contains 14 missions that can only be accessed by unlocking further story acts using Cyphers. These are points earned by completing levels on each of the difficulty options, or shooting hidden masks within each level, to unlock story contracts, such as timed missions where you add time per enemy killed, or where you need to survive a certain time with a specific weapon. Then, you can spend your points to unlock access to the next batch of story missions.

The best way to earn these points is replaying missions on higher difficulties. This is a place where Agent 64 excels. You can choose from either Agent, Special Agent and 64 Agent. This does a clever thing where the medium and hard difficulties include additional objectives that force you to use different equipment or face tougher tasks, such as planting a tracker on a helicopter.

Yet none of this works without nailing the gameplay. As you'd expect, you move through levels shooting enemies and often-times levels become intense shooting galleries. On easy, there's little challenge as every enemy feels like they've trained at the Stormtrooper academy. But it allows you to become accustomed with the level and gain a feeling for how the lock-on functions, or if you've disabled lock-on, how the sway of the gun impacts your shots.

The first level acts as a tutorial to onboard most of the games mechanics. It's a simple game without too many buttons, as there's no jump, crouch or sprint. You shoot your equipped gun or melee an enemy, hold the trigger to activate manual aim to land head-shots or destroy locks, equip gadgets to hack computers, use key cards to unlock doors, and reload weapons or activate planted mines. All while managing your single life bar throughout a whole level, unless you manage to find some body armour.

This simplicity doesn't really come into its own until you try the higher difficulties. You quickly realise that enemies will now land hits, and you'll need to dodge, be aggressive, or wait for them to stop shooting before you attack. However, the balance is off as sometimes tonnes of enemies will rush you, which doesn't always work well when you can die so easily. But my biggest complaint during the story was the levels where you had to escort an AI companion. As they would walk in front of you, or stand in the line of fire and die. And if they died, you would have to restart the mission.

Thankfully, the campaign does go on to include some varied missions. One sees you battling a helicopter with a rocket launcher. Another has John Walter infiltrate a museum to photograph a secret meeting. Although more could've been done to immersive you in the espionage, they were a nice break between the shooting galleries. But most of all, playing through the missions in co-op made them far more entertaining. Whether you play 2 player split-screen or 4 player online, it's a fun time to try to balance both of your health bars as you complete missions.

After completing the campaign, Agent 64 incentivises you to play through the challenge mode on your own or with friends. A set of five groups of challenges that escalate in difficulty. Each varies in objective, location and play-style. Some have you killing a set number of enemies, and others have you using a set weapon without lock-on. These fine-tune your abilities whilst tasking you to complete the objective in a certain time, in order to unlock maps, game modes for multiplayer like control the zone and hold the briefcase, and paradoxes modes which are modifications to apply, like big head mode, no reload and dozens more.

Once you've unlocked the modes for the offline arena, you can setup a local 4-player split-screen match. You're able to fill the match with bots of varying difficulties and types, select maps from the campaign, and choose starter weapons and those placed around the map. With a nice mixture of hard and medium difficulty bots, Agent 64 really comes into its own on split-screen. Being able to complete death matches with different weapons adds a strategic fun factor, especially during team based games when capturing zones. As one stray explosive can turn the tide of a game.

Exactly like the offline arena, the 8 player online is the mode I didn’t get chance to play. But I can only imagine a thriving community forming. It'll just depend on what rule-sets people want to play, and whether players will choose to allow lock-on, or disable it to test their talents without a cross hair.

After trying with and without lock-on, they both have their positives and negatives. Lock-on makes it easy to dispatch close to medium range targets, but it can often feel unnecessarily difficult to line up a shot at a distance. Whereas, without it, close range shots require mastery and long-range targets are more easily dispatched. But it also comes down to weapon type. Handguns and machine guns dispatch enemies quickly, whereas the sniper rifle can be the deadliest weapon in skilled hands. There's fortunately enough weapon variety here for anyone to gain a favourite to use in all modes.

But the key multiplayer components wouldn't function without solid map design. Thankfully, the developer has made a nice selection of multiplayer maps that use classic interconnecting designs, so there's always some kind of action taking place in a nice variety of environments. The game sees you explore offices, a castle, a nightclub and more.

But what matters is Replicant D6 nails the retro shooter feel to create a love letter to shooters from the Goldeneye and Perfect Dark era. It might not be perfect, but it's a charming video game that's been made with real passion, and most importantly of all, it's fun. If you can overlook Agent 64's weaknesses, and especially if someone has an affinity for retro gameplay, there's more than enough modes and quality here to be worth anyone's time.

*Review Code Provided By Publisher

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