The title of the game, I was surprised to discover, is not from the Bond movie GoldenEye, which refers to a Russian satellite. Instead, your character has lost an eye in one of his assignments with MI6, and is rather upset about it. To replace the useless eye, Goldfinger has provided a mechanical eye which allows you to see more then the average person. Of course, since this was designed by Goldfinger, the eye is golden - hence "GoldenEye". Unfortunately, Bond himself makes no appearance in the game. You will, however, encounter many familiar characters from the film franchise over the years, including Dr. No, Pussy Galore, Odd Job, and Xenia Onatopp.

Goldfinger is out to wrest control of the underworld from Dr. No, and there's something about a secret weapon. To be honest, the story is rather difficult to follow due to the poor story-telling implemented in the game. Before and after each mission, there is a brief little synopsis of what you need to do, but they never really mention the overall plot. By the time I had made it to the later levels, I had forgotten exactly what and why I was doing things, other then that I was a bad guy, and running around, killing people and stealing things is what bad guys do.

This is a first person shooter for the DS, a first for the platform (not counting the Metroid Prime: Hunters demo included with early systems) and the platform performs admirably for this genre. However, due to some game design issues, the controls are very awkward and often led to major hand cramps due to trying to manipulate buttons and controls that were just out of reach. There are three different control schemes available and all are designed for either left or right handed people, something which I was glad to see for the lefties out there. By using the control pad or the a/b/x/y buttons, you control your character forward, back and strafe left and right. You use the DS' touch screen to control which way your character is looking.

Your character can wield two weapons at a time, when not restricted by a larger weapon that requires two hands, and this is where the control issues enter the picture. It is clear that EA have gone to great lengths to make it comfortable to fire both these weapons at any time by including the three different control schemes, but none quite seems to work in an ideal way. The recommended setup is to use the DS' thumb-pad and control the first-person view using your thumb and the L and R keys to fire the left and right weapons respectively. This caused the most cramping for me, and simply wasn't going to work. The next option is to use the stylus to aim and have the option of setting one weapon, or both simultaneously, to the L and R button, and you can switch between your weapons by pressing an icon on the screen. The final option - the one which I ended up using the most - again utilized the stylus and permanently had one weapon set to the shoulder buttons. You could then fire the secondary weapon by tapping an icon on the screen.

Your special eye also serves to give you a few extra tactics and abilities above that of the normal henchman. These abilities allow you to see through walls, jam an enemy's weapon (forcing them to reload) and even fling an enemy to their doom. While these are rather neat, you have limited use of them, due to a slowly recharging meter that is diminished each time one of these abilities is used. Also, in order to activate these, you must hit the rather tiny icon on the touch screen. They were so far out of the way for me during gameplay that I usually just completely forgot about them. I can only imagine how difficult these would be to activate using the rather imprecise thumb-button, since the icons are so small. I can easily see someone hitting two or three at a time rather then the single one they want.

In addition to standard FPS action (point and shoot), there is also a little digital lock-picking mini-game included to hack through different checkpoints. This mini-game, very similar to the old game Simon, flashes a sequence of lights that you must match in order as they play. Each time you succeed, another light was added to the sequence up to about five or six lights, depending on the difficulty of the level. This would've been a fun little mini-game to have available outside the main game, as it only appears a handful of times throughout the adventure.

The graphics for this game work surprisingly well. The DS, while not up to par with home consoles or Sony's new PSP handheld in the graphics department, managed to work this FPS quite well. Some of the textures and areas were rather dark in tone, which often made things difficult to see when playing in certain lighting conditions. The enemies were the biggest let-down in terms of graphics for me. There are only a handful of different enemy models used in the game, and they are all used very frequently. It gets rather tiresome killing the same random henchman every time you turn a corner, and a little more variety in them would've helped to immerse you in the many different and varied environments that the game is set in. While these environments are quite varied, the level design is rather bland. There's just not a whole lot of atmosphere to levels, and you can almost predict where the next bend or ladder will be placed.

This game shows that FPS games not only work on the DS handheld, but that they can work really well - if done correctly. However, with poor level design, awkward control scheme and forgettable plot, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent isn't the best game to herald in this new FPS market. With a few tweaks and a little more variety in the graphics, this game could've been a lot fun. Instead, this ho-hum gaming experience leaves me waiting for the first triple-A FPS title for the DS to be released; I know it's just a matter of time.