I've always been quite the fan of games like Goldeneye and TimeSplitters. Simple shooters with simple objectives. Someone told me that there's this demo for a new game coming out on Steam which looks like Goldeneye, why not check it out?
Opening the game up, you're greeted to a simple menu with some simple options. Pick which "Agent" file you want to start using, go through the settings menus, and get onto picking a difficulty. Agent is the easiest with only three objectives, 64 Agent is the hardest with the full five.
Because I did all this while relaxing and just wanting to feel the mechanics of the game out, not take on too big a challenge, I figured I'd play on standard "Agent".
Once you get into the game, well, it's Goldeneye alright. You have blocky graphics, you have this kinda weird blur filter that's a little bit annoying at first but I guess it's the aesthetic, and you have a gun held at the bottom-right corner of the screen. If there's an enemy it moves to point at them for you (or you can press down the right mouse button and go into manual aiming). Manual aiming feels kinda clunky, I think there's mouse acceleration on the movement so it's easy to go way too slow (or way overshoot what you want to point at) but whatever, I got used to it. Not like original Goldeneye aiming was any easier.
In the opening cutscene you saw these dudes with blue armbands shooting at dudes without 'em, turns out they're your friends. Neat. They may not do a great job, they just kinda die fast, but at least they're trying.
Speaking of shooting at enemies, feedback on when you hit is nice. Hit the head and they go down no problem, hit the body in a place for higher damage and they stun, hit them enough and they go down with some goofy/slow animations. A few times I had the enemy bodies end up glitching out, either falling through the floor or through a wall into another room, but that's harmless enough that I don't care.
When you get hit, instead of the curved health/armor bars going up the scren, there's just a simple green bar which pops up in the bottom-center. It's not nostalgic but it works and it's not distracting. That's probably better. Wonder if they'll have the old style be something in the full game?
I got a good laugh out of shooting scenery, everything just explodes when you hit it. Shoot a box? Boom. Shoot a barrel? Boom. Shoot a red barrel? Bigger boom. Shoot a computer? Small boom. No, I didn't see if exploding boxes do damage to enemies.
Finish the objectives by escaping the tower and you get a nice little screen. That's the demo!
Check out the Steam page by clicking this link.