Agent 64 makes the difficulty setting rewrite the mission

You are Secret Agent John Walter, working fourteen missions against an arch-nemesis called Dominic Pulp, through skyscrapers, nightclubs, museums, catacombs and snow bases. The verbs are period-correct and pleasingly unglamorous: hack a terminal, steal the secret plans, free the civilian hostages, and shoot a great many armed guards on the way out. Each mission is one self-contained environment rather than a corridor, and you can run the whole campaign alone or bring someone with you, online or on the same couch.

The part worth stopping on is the difficulty menu. There are three modes — Agent, Special Agent and 64 Agent — and picking a harder one does not just make the guards hit harder. It gives you more objectives to complete, and it opens more of the map to go and find them in. The setting is not a dial on your margin for error. It is a switch on how much of the level exists.

That single decision changes what a replay is for. On a damage-multiplier shooter, the hard run is the same walk with less room to be sloppy, so the reason to do it is pride. Here the hard run is a longer brief in a bigger building, and the store copy is upfront about the intended order: clear it on Agent to learn the place, then raise the difficulty to find out what else was in it.

The same instinct runs through everything bolted on around the campaign. Beating par times and trials unlocks Paradox Mode, a pile of more than seventy modifiers and cheats — big heads, melee disarms, slow bullet speeds, no reload — and Contracts remix existing missions with different objectives and their own modifier presets. Arena splits off for versus: local split-screen, or online with up to eight players and eight bots, in Deathmatch or Briefcase, where holding the case scores and the case then reappears somewhere random. Lobbies are configurable down to weapon sets, rules and modifiers, with ten presets to save.

What’s The Point Of Hard Games, Anyway? argues that difficulty is not one dial but a set of separate tools, and that which tool you reach for decides whether failure produces mastery, meaning, or a refund. Agent 64 reaches for one of the rarer ones. Adding tasks and space costs the player attention and planning rather than reflexes, which is why the 64 Agent run can feel like a different mission instead of a stingier one.

Hitman and the Art of Repetition is the other half of the design. Its point is that replaying a level is not a punishment for failing it — it is the mechanism by which a chaotic first attempt turns into a planned one. Self-contained maps, par times, higher tiers and remixed Contracts are all the same bet: that the building is worth learning, and that knowing where the guard patrol turns is a reward in itself.

Finding the Fun in FPS Campaigns sets out two opposite answers to what a shooter campaign is even for, one rebuilding the combat loop and one rebuilding the structure around it. Agent 64 sits on the structural side, and that is where the risk sits too. Objectives only carry a mission if they ask something of the space — a terminal you have to reach, a hostage who complicates your exit. If the extra objectives on the higher tiers are just more switches on a longer route, the difficulty tiers become padding rather than design.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die is by Replicant D6, self-published, out now on Windows, under Action, Adventure and Indie. It carries single-player, online and split-screen co-op, online and split-screen PvP for up to eight, and Steam achievements — an unusually complete list of ways to play for a small team.

The split-screen is the quiet flex. Local versus mostly disappeared from shooters for reasons that had nothing to do with players not wanting it, and a game aiming at the console shooters of the late nineties without it would be doing a costume rather than a homage.

If what appeals is a game that keeps the same fight and changes the rules on top of it, Shot One Fighters is the other one on this list — a fighting game that throws out your entire moveset between runs and makes the modifier, not the content, the reason to go again.