After Rare was done with Goldeneye, EA was quick to snatch up the Bond license, leaving Rare to make Perfect Dark and Eurocom to handle the next N64 game with the Bond name- The World is Not Enough. While not the first Bond game released post-Goldeneye, it was the first N64 Bond game release post-Goldeneye, and Eurocom smashed it out of the park with TWINE.
Eurocom is responsible for producing some of the best post-Rare Bond games. There are even some N64 gamers that will even tell you they like TWINE even better than Goldeneye. While I still, personally, prefer Goldeneye, I can't deny that The World is Not Enough is the best possible Bond-licensed followup to Goldeneye there could have been for the N64. It even surpasses it in some areas.
Eurocom not only faithfully reproduced the gameplay and level design aspects that made Goldeneye so fun, but also made a game that feels more like a bond game. Not only did they manage to get quite a bit of voice-over dialog in this cart (which was a big deal for N64 games), but the focus is more gadget-heavy in nature, meaning the game captures the spirit of Bond better than Goldeneye did.
The mission designs mirror those in Goldeneye where the devs give you a map and a variety of objectives to complete. As in Goldeneye, the number of objectives depends on the difficulty level you are playing on. The mission structure, controls, and general gameplay feel recapture Goldeneye's feel, while the bigger gadget-focus recaptures the Bond feel.
The Gunplay in Tomorrow Never Dies has a good feel to it, even if I do like Goldeneye's faster and more arcadey feeling gunplay a little better. It's a little slower in feel, but has the same controls scheme and auto aiming feature. They really did, for the most pert, recapture the same exhilarating feel of the gunplay in Rare's Goliath.
For the multiplayer Eurocom even added bots to the deathmatch mode. They aren't programmed nearly as well as those in Perfect Dark, but you can still have some fun bot deathmatches in this game. Overall this game still offers some fantastic split-screen multiplayer, which is why we really loved Goldeneye so much to begin with.
If you weren't an informed gamer at the time, and didn't know that Rare had lost the Bond license, you probably wouldn't have known that TWINE was developed by a separate developer. Even though it stands in it's predecessor's huge shadow, Eurocom really did make make a bond game that is just as good as Rare's. Some of the best Bond games that have been made since, have also been Eurocom products and they really showed off their Bond development talents starting here in The World is Not Enough. If you loved Goldeneye, but haven't given this game a chance yet, you owe it to yourself to give it a look. It recaptures the same classic feel, but also adds to the formula. This is still one of the best First Person shooters on the N64.
NOTE: The video is in widescreen, because TWINE is one of the handful of N64 games that has a widescreen aspect ratio option in the video options menu.
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