Perfect Dark - FARSIGHT

It's been crazy seeing Rare absolutely die on the vine after Microsoft's purchase of the studio. After a brief rush of early Xbox 360 releases, the British developers - who had, let's not forgot, consistently delivered games absolutely at the level of their internally developed Nintendo stablemates - were demoted to dashboard avatars. Absolutely criminal. What are Rare working on currently? No idea. Certainly not this belated reboot of Perfect Dark - that honour falls to The Initiative, a new studio based in Santa Monica who Microsoft are talking up as their AAAA secret weapon. 

GoldenEye 25 / Spies Don't Die

Hit with a cease and desist from MGM several years into their recreation, the team behind this Unreal Engine 4 remake of GoldenEye 007 have decided not to junk all their hard, but legally actionable, work. The developers are forging ahead with Spies Don't Die, an original piece indebted to 90s first-person shooters, using their already completed assets.

UPDATE 14/08/2020: Gameplay video of a recreated GoldenEye Silo level replaced with a statement from GoldenEye 25 dev Yannick Zenhäusern after the former video was delisted from YouTube.

UPDATE 18/07/2026: Zenhäusern's delisted statement replaced with a release date announcement trailer for the latest iteration of this project, Agent 64: Spies Never Die. 

E3 - PIMPLE

Rare's obnoxiously difficult, pointedly bare Battletoads gets a modern update. The memory-testing NES classic is being re-configured as a super busy beater with an elastic, Saturday morning cartoon style not a million miles away from Nickelodeon's recent, not to mention brilliant, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

E3 2015 - 10,000 GAMERSCORE

Hopefully Rare Replay and Sea of Thieves signal a change in Microsoft's attitude towards the underappreciated studio. Not sure why you'd buy a second-party Nintendo studio then have them working solely on wallet bleeding t-shirts for online avatars. Anyway, Sea of Thieves has nifty cannonball firing animations and Rare Replay promises a curated moment feature that allows you to dip in and out of the assembled classics.

Quantum of Solace (Video Game)

The title's a misnomer; this interact adapt is far more concerned with leading players through unseen action brackets in the Casino Royale storyline than allow play-act insight into Quantum of Solace's murky revenge narrative. Upfront, you get a few bare Quantum paths, before the game delves deep into flashback territory. On release, expectation for Quantum of Solace: The Video Game was unusually high. Bond has a fair video game pedigree, mainly thanks to the N64's peerless GoldenEye, and developers Treyarch had Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare engine to mess about with. The imagination brimmed with ideas of a polished spy-kit shooter, perhaps informed by the black-ops patter that made Modern Warfare sing.

The result, no doubt thanks to inflexible licence paymaster and a satirically short production window, is more like a product push redraft of Namco's on-rails shooter Time Crisis, with Daniel Craig's 007 as the aspiration item. Perspective shifts constantly. First person is used for iron-sighting, and third person for defence snaps. Jab buttons near the ubiquitous cover, and context drifts outside the eyeline, allowing the player to gaze upon Craig, and his relationship to surroundings. The mechanic ticks two boxes: Gears of War's land seizure gameplay is referenced for the magpies, and Craig becomes visible without excessively compromising the point and blast genre stylings. Shame it's such an uninspired affair.

A simulacra of Craig's Bond drifts aimlessly along preordained paths mucking in on sequences that bare no relation to on-screen action. Break stealth and the boring backroom levels swarm with faceless, arcade bold suicide shooters. Time to bog yourself down in cover and fire blind. A neat summation of this game's flaws would be the trailing of the Alex Dimitrios character. In the film Bond weaves in and out of Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, the raw exhibit figures providing a garishly fragile contrast to 007's blue-lit machine movement. Were Treyarch inclined to just import a poise shredding shoot-out into this situation, you'd have a startling centrepiece. Instead, action shifts to a nondescript science centre, full of barely breakable techno-nothings.