The best action games like GoldenEye 007 are Perfect Dark, TimeSplitters 2 and Halo: Combat Evolved. Below are 12, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to action costs you.
Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.
What you get: Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.
What made GoldenEye 007 worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the action part of that answer, and only the action part.
The same team's follow-up — more of everything, and bots before that was normal.
By the same people after they left Rare, and the best of the lineage.
The console shooter that took the crown next, and worth revisiting.
Spy-fi shooting with clever missions and a sense of humour.
Objective-and-approach design at its modern best.
Objective-based missions with genuine freedom in how you finish them.
If the stealth half of GoldenEye is what you liked.
Arkane's stylish spy shooter, built on repeating one day.
The Wii reimagining, better than its reputation.
Open missions, many approaches, good sandbox AI.
For the plan-and-approach part, with a very different pace.
Same console, same short-run replay-for-medals structure.
Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.
The full list is on games like GoldenEye 007 — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Perfect Dark. The same team's follow-up — more of everything, and bots before that was normal.
No. GoldenEye 007 released on the Nintendo 64, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.
No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full GoldenEye 007 list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is action — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the action guide for where to start in the genre generally.