GoldenEye 007: Reloaded

With a new Modern Warfare on the way, you'd have thought Activision had done enough to secure the affections of Xbox 360 shooter fans this Christmas. But the publisher has gone the extra mile with GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, a cleaned-up port of the Wii remake of the N64 game that, along with Halo, sold the whole "FPS on console" dealio back in the day.

Even given such nostalgic associations, and even given the Bond license's newfound vitality, Reloaded faces an uphill struggle for ratings against the likes of Battlefield 3 and Skyrim. Though pretty enough, the engine is hardly cutting edge, with none of the destructible flourishes and bombast that lard this winter's heavyweight releases.

But developer Eurocom (otherwise known for stellar arcade shooter Dead Space: Extraction) makes a convincing case. Online, it's all about the wealth of things to tinker with. Offline, the original level template has been thoroughly reworked, keeping GoldenEye's basic thrust but taking the emphasis marginally off the gun-on-gun for the sake of newfangled cinematic direction and variety.

Eurocom's twist comes through in the small touches. The famous dam mission begins as you remember it, with Bond (now a glowering Craig rather than an arch Brosnan) and Double-Oh buddy Alec (now a somewhat generic guy in a woolly hat rather than Sean Bean) infiltrating a Russkie facility. But there are now QTE silent executions to grease your progress up to and around the look-out tower, and casual guard chatter fills in backstory the original left blank.

In a witty, poignant moment Rare's designers never dreamed of, Bond flips open the vanity mirror in a captured jeep and discovers a photo of the unfortunate driver's girlfriend, which he tosses brusquely aside. The pathos of the discovery gives way to an on-rails gunfight, as Alec barges the jeep through checkpoints while Bond takes out turrets and oil tanks. Eurocom wants to test your reflexes rather than pull your heartstrings, but a decade on, there's room for a little sober reflection between the shooty bits.

The level's rifles, pistols and shotguns have been brought up to Call of Duty spec, with ironsights and fleshed-out reloading animations, and function much as you'd expect. Though the results aren't mind-blowing, a huge amount of effort has been poured into eking new scenarios out of the trip to that famous climatic leap from the dam. One example has you winkling a sniper out of a look-out tower while enemies pour in from either side, then defending it using the sniper's dropped weapon against a second wave.

Nostalgia cuts in strongest when we sample the multiplayer mode, beginning with the offline four-player splitscreen option. It's bad news for the frame rate, but the game is sufficiently slow-paced that this doesn't matter much. With the full expanded unlock suite at our disposal on 15 maps (five new to Reloaded), we're soon engaged in heated wrangling over who gets to wield the gold-plated revolver and, most importantly of all, who gets to play Oddjob, whose elusive stature prompted many a living room punch-up in the 90s.

There's a definite "kitchen sink" feel to the unlocks tree, which encompasses rocket launchers, suppressors, five different submachine guns, health buffs, reflex and scope sights, recoil compensators, "Multitask" (which lets you wield an extra primary weapon), and "Last Act of Defiance", the Bond version of Martyrdom. Given the relatively modest map dimensions, the game's shotguns are an absolute terror: we take out two men in one shot during a round of objective defence.