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The Xbox 360 prequel to Rare’s Nintendo 64 hit, Perfect Dark. Players once again slip into the role of Joanna Dark and fight their way through a twisting sci-fi storyline. The franchise’s staple multiplayer mode returns, this time with full online support.

Set in the year 2020, three years before the original hit game Perfect Dark, Perfect Dark Zero features a gripping story, multiple game scenarios for endless replayability, a massive arsenal of weapons and combat-enabled vehicles. The sci-fi, first-person shooter features a fully interactive world, support for up to 50 players online via Xbox Live, breathtaking high-resolution graphics and spectacular special effects.

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Publisher: Microsoft

Developer: Rare

Online Play: 4 Versus/ 32 Co-op

Local Play:

November 23, 2005 –
Perfect Dark, when released back in 2000 on the Nintendo 64, was a big deal. It offered a slew of refinements over the already excellent N64 shooter, GoldenEye 007, as well as even more content and game modes. Along the same lines, many were hoping Perfect Dark Zero, which seems to have been in development since a time only few on Earth can remember, would be a similarly exhilarating experience. To an extent, it manages to live up to the hopes and expectations. It offers several improvements and still is able to maintain the flavor of the original. In addition, there’s a huge amount of options for multiplayer matches and cooperative play on and off of Xbox Live.

The story of this game follows Joanna Dark, a super spy, during a period of time before she became wrapped up with the Carrington Institute in her battle against dataDyne, an evil corporation. Like in the previous game, you start out a mission with one or two concrete objectives, then acquire more based on which difficulty level you choose. Some objectives are necessary to complete while others are optional. Once you beat a level on one difficulty, it opens up the next. You’ll need to beat the entire game on Perfect Agent, the third difficulty level, if you want to unlock the near impossible fourth difficulty level, Dark Agent.

Joanna is back and ready to shoot guns and go to rave parties.Perfect Dark Zero is a game where the single and multiplayer modes are split into two distinct categories, making them almost totally different games. We’ll start with the single player. Your experience here will vary largely with what level of difficulty you’ve chosen. On Agent, the game can be breezed through with little to no difficulty. Secret Agent provides a moderate challenge, while Perfect Agent will force you to replay missions until you’ve got pretty much every enemy position and strategy memorized. It would have been nice to see a save game element instituted in PDZ, since as it is you’ll need to replay the entire level if you fail an objective, which is really aggravating if you’ve played an entire level through only to screw up at the very end. As it is, there’s a checkpoint feature you can respawn at roughly halfway through each level, but if you choose to use it you’ll lose the ability to keep stats in the level.

As you make your way through PDZ on each difficulty level you’ll be able to unlock more and more of the game’s arsenal which you’ll be able to use in each level afterward. This becomes crucial on some levels since each weapon has highly specific secondary and tertiary fires. For example, you’ll find the Jungle Storm stage is near impossible on the harder difficulties if you don’t have a P90 so you can use its radar sweep secondary function to locate enemies through the foliage. The weapon variety in the game is great, on the whole, and every weapon you’ll be able to find some sort of use for.

The new cover feature.The single player mode’s biggest problems are with the enemy A.I. and the weak storyline. Granted, the storyline doesn’t really factor into the gameplay, but it’s pretty much impossible not to notice how laughably bad it is. Many of the game’s major events are treated as almost inconsequential, and often you’ll find missions start and end with tons of loose ends fluttering about. The voice acting too, during these sequences, is overflowing with a forced wit and general cheesiness.

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