GoldenEye 007 Reloaded for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3

There’s no denying that the reboot of the 1997 N64 Goldeneye 007 for the Wii last year was a success. They managed to still get a similar feeling from the old game brought into 2010, even though they removed Brosnan and inserted Daniel Craig in the lead role instead and changed the levels around and even some of the story. I’m sure there were a few people out there though including myself who didn’t get everything they could out of it or bother with it at all simply because it was on the Wii.

Well, the good news is that the game is now coming to HD consoles as well in the form of Goldeneye 007 Reloaded. I was invited to an event in London last week where Activision producer James Steer showed us a couple of levels from the game, gave us a bit of a hands-on time and explained just what was going into this HD version of the remake of the classic game. Are you still with me? Good, then I’ll begin with what he told us.

This isn’t simply a port of the Wii version. It’s been built from the ground up on HD consoles and is looking pretty tasty. The first thing we were shown was the Severnaya level where the story has been changed a little. Instead of Bond getting there after the EMP strike, this time it happens when he’s there resulting in equipment malfunctioning and helicopters almost landing on his head! In fact, the whole premise of the game has changed from the end of the Cold War to a plot about the banking crisis. Even key characters have been replaced by new actors so we won’t see Alan Cummings or Famke Janssen appearing in this game.

We see the action unfold when Bond makes his way through a snowy forest, taking some guards out from behind to clear the way by punching them in the back of head and grabbing them by the neck. Daniel Craig’s stunt double was actually motion captured for parts of the game where we see Bond from a first-person perspective but in-game, they’ve decided to keep the action in first-person to keep the immersion level up.

We were then treated to the dam mission as demoed when the game came out on the Wii last year to see the comparison. As you’d expect, the game is already looking a lot better thanks to the power of the HD consoles and the game’s only at pre-alpha stage at the moment. There’s still plenty of time for the team at Eurocom to polish things even further.

As well as the campaign mode there will also be challenge missions to play through featuring assault, stealth and wave defence. We were shown an example of wave defence where you must download information from a server whilst you fend off increasingly difficult waves of enemies. This mode alone will add ten hours onto the campaign and you’ll be able to post your scores onto a leaderboard for your friends to beat. Levels can also be tweaked in the challenge designer to make them more difficult and you can also add fun things to the challenge like a paintball mode.

So what about the multiplayer? Well, that’s back again as a split-screen offering but there’s also a 16 player online mode, new maps and game modes, new weapons and characters and some spy-related modes that could be co-op.

It seems like gamers who own an Xbox 360 or PS3 are in for a treat. Goldeneye 007 on the Wii was already a good game but with the learnings they’ve taken from last year and all the extra modes in this version as well, it seems like Goldeneye 007 Reloaded could be the ultimate modern Bond game to date! My guess is it will be out Summer next year.

Related: Goldeneye 007 for the Wii, James Bond