20 Best N64 Action Games

Mission: Impossible was originally released for the Nintendo 64 in 1998, and it took a long road to get there. An Ocean team worked on it for three years, and the development was troubled, partly because the team overestimated what the Nintendo 64 could do. The game shares the premise of the film but tells its own story across 20 levels. Press the aim button and Hunt becomes translucent while a crosshair lets you shoot in any direction.

Critics were mixed and compared it to GoldenEye 007 at every turn, mostly complaining about slow controls. It still sold more than one million copies by February 1999. Played today it is clunky, but it is a spy game that asks you to think before you shoot, and that was not common on the N64.

Quake II was the second installment of the Quake series, and id Software built it over the course of a year before it came out on PC on December 9, 1997. It was also the first id Software game not released for MS-DOS. Funny enough, it was supposed to be a new game with its own name, and titles like "Lock and Load" were on the table. The N64 version followed in 1999, with a campaign that gives you mission objectives tied to the story.

It is a meaner, darker shooter than most of the N64's library. A PC game this big squeezed onto a cartridge should not work as well as it does, and on a pad it still feels solid.

Turok 3 is the third main installment of the series and the sequel to Seeds of Evil. That game ends with Adon warning that the force behind it all still exists, and this one picks up the thread. A separate Game Boy Color game with the same name came out in 2000 with a different storyline, so check the box before you buy. Critics gave the N64 game generally favorable reviews.

In 2023 Nightdive Studios released a remaster for modern consoles and PC, which makes it one of the easiest games on this list to play today. It ends the N64 trilogy on a strong note, even if it never got the attention the second game did.

Sarge's Heroes is a third-person shooter where the green plastic soldiers fight General Plastro's Tan Army, which has found portals to Our World, the human world. So one of your battlefields is a desk, and the portal is the opening of a coffee cup. The 3DO Company made the N64 version itself, and its founder Trip Hawkins wanted a character-focused action game in the style of Super Mario.

It leans into the toy side of the army men more than earlier games did, and that is the whole charm. One of the soldiers is a bazooka man with "the musical chops and coolness of a Blues musician", which tells you the tone. As of 2022 the N64 and PlayStation versions together had sold 1.3 million units.

BattleTanx is a 1998 action game for the Nintendo 64 from The 3DO Company, and the idea is right there in the name. You drive a tank and you blow up other tanks. The deathmatch rule is simple: the first to seven kills wins. There is even a Family Mode, a deathmatch where you cannot switch ammo and can only use up what you have.

It was followed by a 1999 sequel, Global Assault, which sits just outside this list. BattleTanx is a couch game first, the kind you rented on a Friday and fought over until Sunday night.

Buck Bumble lets you fly freely through the air or walk around on the ground to finish each level, and the only real limit is height. Some enemies, like beetles and wasps, come with generators that release another enemy when the first one dies, so you learn to shoot the source. The game was built with the Rumble Pak in mind, so you feel every hit. There is also Buck Battle, an airborne dogfight deathmatch for two players.

Reviews were lukewarm, and even the good ones mentioned technical problems. Then something odd happened. The theme music by Justin Scharvona found a large cult following in recent years, so a lot of people know the song long before they know the game.

WinBack puts you in the boots of Jean-Luc, one of only two survivors of Operation Winback, which is ultimately a failure. From there it is a one-man infiltration, and the game tells you how well you are shooting with color. A red hit means a critical headshot.

GamePro said it was not Metal Gear 64, and that on its own merits it would "easily infiltrate the hearts of N64 gamers". The PlayStation 2 version later did slightly better than the N64 version with critics, and a standalone sequel, WinBack 2: Project Poseidon, came out in 2006 for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The N64 original is the one people remember, and it is worth a look for anyone who loved sneaking through GoldenEye's facility.

Shadows of the Empire was one part of a whole multimedia project, and its hero is Dash Rendar, a minor character from the book. Skipping the movie heroes gave the developers more freedom with the game and story. Nintendo agreed to grow the cartridge from 8 MB to 12 MB so it could hold roughly 15 minutes of sampled music, which makes it unique among N64 games for using a digitized orchestral soundtrack.

Critics were mixed, but it was a top seller of 1997 on the N64, with more than one million copies sold. One review admitted there was little competition, since only eight N64 games came out in the US in 1996, and still called it a must for Star Wars fans. The snowspeeder level is the part everyone remembers, and it later inspired a whole game.

Turok was Acclaim's first N64 game and the first N64 game developed by a third party. It adapts the Valiant Comics series, and bugs pushed it back from September 1996 to January 1997. Iguana pushed the hardware to its limits and had to compress or cut things to fit it all on an 8 megabyte cartridge. Acclaim had cash flow problems, and it was counting on this one to turn things around.

It worked. Turok sold 1.5 million copies and boosted sales of the Nintendo 64 itself. The jumping can make you want to throw the controller across the room. Players who grew up with it love the whole series, and they tend to recommend all of the Turok games, not just one.

Treasure built Sin and Punishment around the N64 controller, which was the guiding inspiration for the whole design. Development started in 1997 with only four staff and ended in 2000 with more people than any Treasure project before it. The story is wild even by Treasure standards. Scientists breed a genetically engineered species as food, and the creatures mutate in northern Japan and start attacking people.

It never came out in the West on the N64, so it grew a cult following among import gamers and became one of the most demanded games for the Wii Virtual Console. Western players finally got it there in 2007. Critics loved how Treasure cut the polygon count to keep the action smooth while the game still looked stylish.

Eurocom made this James Bond shooter, based on the 1999 film, and it came out on the N64 in North America on October 17, 2000. Bond has to stop a terrorist from triggering a nuclear meltdown in the waters of Istanbul. Eurocom used original production material to rebuild the film's locations, then added its own, like a mission in the London Underground. It also supports the Expansion Pak for better graphics.

Everyone compared it to Rare's two Bond-era shooters, which is a tough room to walk into. It held up anyway, with critics praising its smooth frame rate and calling it one of the console's most technically impressive games. The split-screen mode for up to four players is why people still bring it up, and it sold more than one million copies in the US.

Body Harvest was meant to be an N64 launch game, but Nintendo, its first publisher, had issues with its violent themes and dropped it. DMA had to find a new publisher, and Midway put it out in North America. You play Adam Drake, a genetically engineered soldier who travels through time to stop aliens that come back every 25 years to harvest people. The first stop is Greece in 1916.

You have to be careful not to shoot or run down the civilians you are there to rescue, which is harder than it sounds once the aliens show up. It is a strange, ambitious game with a lot of open ground for a cartridge, and the players who found it back then still talk it up as one of the N64's big surprises.

Gauntlet Legends started in the arcade as a sequel to the 1985 Gauntlet and Gauntlet II, and the N64 got the first home console port in September 1999 in North America. With the Expansion Pak it supports four players at once. Without it you are stuck at three, which is the kind of math that ends friendships.

It was the last Gauntlet produced by Atari Games. You hunt for three rune stones in each kingdom, and the PlayStation port later dropped to two players, which makes the N64 version the one for a full table. GamePro called it "a great one for gamers who love the idea of intense multiplayer action", and that is exactly how it plays.

Seeds of Evil was meant to fit on a 12 MB cartridge with no multiplayer at all. It shipped on a 32 MB one after 21 months of work, and the multiplayer made it in. With the Expansion Pak it runs at 640x480, and the enemies got a third, gorier death animation on top of the two from the first game.

It sold 1.4 million copies by January 1999, and reviewers praised its detailed graphics and the smart enemy AI. The frame rate and the fog got complaints, both fair. Nightdive's remaster is now on PC and modern consoles, and players back this one over every other Turok game.

Blast Corps was Rare's first N64 game, made by a team of four to seven people, many of them recent graduates. A nuclear missile carrier is rolling across the map, and your job is to clear the buildings out of its way before it hits one. There are 57 levels seen from a three-quarters overhead view, and the cheery music speeds up as the timer runs low.

It got Metacritic's second highest N64 ratings of 1997 and sold one million copies, which was lower than the team expected. Retro Gamer later praised the humor it found in a serious premise, and the dump truck's drift came from the power slide in Mario Kart 64. Nobody else made a game like it, a puzzle game where the answer is usually a bulldozer.

Jet Force Gemini was inspired by 80s arcade games and by newer ones like Super Metroid and Super Mario 64, and it blends a shoot 'em up with an action-adventure. The game makes you play its three characters one at a time until they reach a meeting point. After that, picking the right character for the right stage is the key to finishing it.

Critics liked the detailed graphics and how long it lasts, and complained about the controls and the demand that you save every Tribal to fully finish it. That last rule is the one everyone remembers, usually with a groan. It came back on Nintendo Classics in 2023, so it is easy to try now.

Rogue Squadron grew out of that snowspeeder level in Shadows of the Empire, and Factor 5 turned the idea into a whole game of flight combat. Factor 5 designed the game engine and worked closely with Nintendo, while LucasArts handled the story. It came out in December 1998 and was one of the first games to take advantage of the Expansion Pak, which Factor 5 had asked Nintendo to sell in stores.

Critics praised the flight controls and the tech but complained about the distance fog and the missing multiplayer. It still sold more than one million copies by August 1999. Every mission hands out a medal, bronze, silver, or gold, and chasing gold on every level is what keeps people coming back.

Nintendo made Star Fox 64 after it canceled Star Fox 2 on the SNES, worried that the 16-bit graphics would look poor next to newer games. The team had no final N64 hardware at first and worked with a modified Super Nintendo controller without analog sticks, because the real hardware was busy with Super Mario 64. It was also the first Nintendo 64 game to support the Rumble Pak, which came bundled with retail copies.

Critics loved the precise controls and the branching paths that make you want to play it again. It sold more than 4 million copies, the best-selling game in the series. It is a short game you play for years, and multiplayer is the only place you get a Landmaster with upgraded lasers.

Perfect Dark is Rare's spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007, and it runs on an upgraded version of its game engine. You play Joanna Dark, an agent of the Carrington Institute, trying to stop an alien conspiracy by the rival corporation dataDyne. GoldenEye director Martin Hollis led the game's production for the first fourteen months before he left Rare. It needs an Expansion Pak for the campaign and most of the multiplayer.

The multiplayer added a co-operative mode and deathmatch with computer-controlled bots, and it won a BAFTA for 2000. Players agree on its one big flaw: split-screen slows to a crawl once you fill it with bots. Nobody seems to mind much. It came back on Nintendo Classics in 2024.

GoldenEye started life as a side-scrolling platform game for the SNES and turned into a 3D shooter inspired by Doom and Virtua Cop. An inexperienced team led by Martin Hollis made it over two and a half years, and the gaming press expected little. Its stealth came from designer David Doak's simple trick: every gunshot had a radius, and any guard inside it heard you. The Klobb is named after Ken Lobb, Rare's contact at Nintendo.

It sold over eight million copies, the third best-selling N64 game, and won a BAFTA in 1998. It showed that home consoles could do first-person shooters, and its split-screen multiplayer is where a lot of us lost whole weekends. Players recommend it more than any other N64 action game, and it is on Switch and Xbox today.