The game combines elements from all over the James Bond universe - Dr No, Pussy Galore, Goldfinger, and Odd Job. Even Xenia Onatopp makes her presence felt. If you're not a Bond purist, and you can stand the jarring mix of characters from different eras, the plot is amusing enough, and holds your interest more than the usual "aliens are invading" yawner you get with a lot of other first person shooters.
The main gimmick for the game is your "GoldenEye", a device that lets you turn on a temporary shield, ala "Halo", perform a limited form of gravity manipulation on enemies, ala "Half Life 2", hack into computers and electrical devices, ala "Deus Ex" and a fourth mode where you can see through walls and other obstacles for a limited period of time. Some functions drain power faster than others, but not using the eye at all slowly recharges its power. The shield can be quite useful at times, and there's at least two specific places in the single player campaign where using the computer hacking ability is mandatory, but you'll find that the seeing-through-walls and gravity swinging features are fun in theory and rarely used in practice.
You get bonus points for behaving badly - brutal kills, pushing people off walls and into vats of acid, grabbing adversaries to use as human shields, kills via explosions, using traps in the scenery to slaughter 'em. It's a nice idea, and may encourage future replays. The scenery traps are amusing the first time or two that you use them - trapdoors in the floor, electrifying metal catwalks and the like. How's that for entertainment value?
The controls are configurable and solid as far as it goes, with the eye powers tied to the D-Pad. Graphics are very nice indeed, with decent character models, interesting environments that aren't a million miles away from what you would expect from a Bond game (underground lairs and the like). Weapons? The usual assortment, with a couple of interesting extras - an EMP gun that lets you disable enemy weapons or shields, and a plot-related one kill weapon that makes a lot of the final level of single player an exercise in frustration.
Is it incredibly awesomely brilliant? Not really, but it did hold my attention long enough to complete it on easy. I wouldn't suggest paying full retail, and as of a grand total of maybe two months after initial release, it wasn't possible to - unless you tried hard. If you want a shooter fix and you see this at a modest price, knock yourself out.
