Spend the Night: Agent 64: Spies Never Die

Back in college, we had a weeknight routine. At 10 p.m. we would meet at a friend’s room and watch reruns of The Simpsons. After, the Nintendo 64 was fired up and we would play GoldenEye split-screen for about an hour, each pretending we weren’t looking at where our opponents were on the map. Since there were more than four of us, the losers were kicked to the sidelines while the winners kept playing. 

When I saw a preview trailer for Agent 64: Spies Never Die, it looked like an obvious love letter to GoldenEye. Once I started playing, it was clear that the makers of the game played even more of the James Bond classic than I did, and tried to incorporate as much as they could in their game.

The Game

Agent 64: Spies Never Die is an early ‘90s-style shooter where you play a mostly retired spy. In the story mode, you start the game sitting at home one night playing your favorite video game on a classic system. Invaders breach your residence and you must fight your way out to try and determine why this is happening.

Each act of the game contains multiple levels you must first clear on the default game mode called Agent. Upon completion, you can advance to the next floor, or play it through again at a higher difficulty. There are three modes in which each level can be played: Agent, Special Agent and 64 Agent. For those who played GoldenEye, this is a familiar concept, where each difficulty adds more objectives and makes the area harder. 

Finishing a level rewards the player with “cyphers.” These are digital tokens required to unlock the future acts of the game in story mode. Players receive one cypher for completing the level on Agent mode, two for Special Agent and three for 64 Agent. Each act requires more cyphers than a player will earn by playing through the levels on the easiest setting, so they will need to play some of the missions again on a higher difficulty to advance the story.

Players can also complete contracts by finding purple masks hidden on each floor. These unlock different missions for each level. One example is called Arcade Survivor, where you need to continuously kill bad guys to keep your agent alive. Each kill adds two seconds to your death clock. Once the clock reaches zero, that round is over. 

Story mode can be played solo or cooperatively, either online or split screen. However, Agent 64: Spies Never Die offers additional modes of play, including an arena module called deathmatch. In deathmatch, up to eight players compete to see who can garner the most kills. This can be set to a specific number of kills or for a set amount of time. AI players of varying degrees of difficulty can be added to the mix to make it even more entertaining.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die - as good as GoldenEye?

Everything about Agent 64: Spies Never Die reminds me of GoldenEye. The camera flies in past the enemies when you start a new level. Evil henchmen have the same awkward roll. Guns and shooting have similar feel and auto aim. In the second stage, you drop through the ductwork into a bathroom stall. I can’t count the number of times I spawned in similar vents playing GoldenEye against friends, only to have one of their proximity mines blow me up the second I dropped down.  

Spies Never Die’s deathmatch reminds me of those nights in the dorms. I managed to get a few friends to join me to try out this mode. We only had a few locations unlocked, but the temple was another that was heavily inspired by GoldenEye. Running around and shooting each other in the game was delightful and fun. Initially we threw a couple bots in for easy kills, but later made teams with each of us paired with an AI player. 

We also tried cooperative play. One of the annoyances of this game is it required us to create a new lobby and password when we changed online play modes from deathmatch to cooperative. Once we eventually got in, it started us at the first level, rather than letting us choose one we had all already beaten. Friendly fire is on in the game, so we needed to be careful where we aimed. We agreed this would be a fun way to speed run levels.

Story mode in this game is also fun, but the idea of having to go back to replay levels at a different difficulty to gain cyphers to advance the story is annoying. When you are just interested in playing through the story, you should be able to do that without jumping through additional hoops. I played through the first two acts of Spies Never Die, and would have completed it if I did not need to backtrack through levels I previously completed. 

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Overall, deathmatch is the biggest selling point of this game for me. Agent 64: Spies Never Die is the kind of game you want to buy your friends for their birthday so you all can play this once the family is in bed. Heck, I might even throw an episode of The Simpson’s on the second monitor to make it feel even more like old times. Even if you do not have the nostalgia of GoldenEye like I do, this is still a fun shooter you can play with friends. We tested the game on the Steam Deck and a Linux PC, and it runs great on both. The game is currently on sale for under $20, and for a frugal gamer like me, that is the perfect price point.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die is available now on Steam. 

Review Haiku:

Retro GoldenEye
Made for current gen PCs
Nostalgia runs deep

Editorial note: the author received a review code for this game.