Unfortunately, it’s clear from the start that this isn’t the same Rare who brought us those two FPS classics on the Nintendo 64 all those years back. The controls are the first thing to set alarm bells ringing with some of the twitchiest aiming in the history of console first person shooters. Lining up a headshot can be a real hit and miss affair; there’s none of the smoothness that the likes of Call of Duty 2 or Halo offer. If Perfect Dark Zero was on a PC then it wouldn’t be much of a problem, as mouse control would work superbly, but you need a small degree of aim assist when it comes to aiming with an analogue stick. That’s not to say that having no aim assist is the sole reason of the problem because the recent Black on the Xbox doesn’t have any and nailing headshots isn’t half as troublesome as it can be here.
Altering the sensitivity settings can improve things somewhat, but still often frustrates as you miss a headshot by millimetres then naturally nudge the stick to correct it only to see the next shot miss by the same distance past the other side of the enemies face. It wouldn’t be such an issue if Perfect Dark's combat wasn’t so focussed on getting a quick headshot, but when enemies can take the amount of body shots that they do here it becomes a problem. There are times where the battle against the control is tougher than the battle against the enemies themselves and the fun factor is greatly reduced as a result.
Perfect Dark's 'cover mode' in action.
Aside from the aiming-related issues, there’s little else to complain about regarding control. General movement feels good and the whole thing runs at a decent speed. In fact, in a nice touch you actually move at different speeds in relation to the weight of the weapon you are carrying. Put your guns away and you’ll move much quicker than you would with a large sniper rifle in hand. Weapon switching is handled with the D-pad, while the triggers deal with your standard, secondary and tertiary firing modes.
It all sounds like most other FPSs so far but Perfect Dark Zero features two things that few games have ever incorporated. The first is the roll move which is handy to avoid enemy fire and get yourself out of harms way quickly. The second how ever is the ‘cover mode’. Pressing A against a wall will put Joanna's back towards it and the camera will shift into third person. From here you can aim a shot before stepping out and firing a clip into the face of an unsuspecting enemy. It’s not perfect - you'll sometimes ‘stick’ to a wall you didn’t want to and there are too many things in the levels that you can’t use the cover mode on that you wish you could - but it’s a novel addition all the same.
Fourteen missions make up Perfect Dark Zero's single player campaign and while the length is adequate, the actual quality of the missions is incredibly inconsistent. The game has its moments with a fair few flashes of brilliance. Mission 2, for example, is one of the highlights of the game, offering a good mix of stealthy CCTV camera shooting with frantic all-out firefights. That, along with level design that offers the players multiple ways through the environment is what more of the game should have been like. You start mission 2 in a parking lot fending off a gang of enemies. Once they’re all dead how you move is up to you. You can use the key card to go out the front entrance and make your way to the warehouse dodging cameras. Or you could take a detour and program a robot to get you in the front entrance. Or you could avoid all that and use a demolition charge to blow the wall of the parking lot and take you right around to the side of the warehouse. Excellent.
Some of the more linear levels are dealt with well too by ramping things up the action stakes. The rooftops level that we’ve all seen in preview videos is a great example of this, as is one of the later levels where you storm through a town at night, guards swinging down from drop ships all over the place. Had this quality been offered throughout the game, Perfect Dark Zero could have been a killer FPS to kick off the 360’s life. But a lot of the level designs border on the mundane and far too often you’re left to wander around repetitive-looking corridors trying to complete your next disappointingly vague mission objective. Had the objectives been remotely satisfying, things might have been different, but to reward the player with little more than a line of congratulatory text isn’t enough these days. Back in the day of Goldeneye and the original Perfect Dark, lavish cutscenes and set pieces were almost unheard of in FPS’s, but the genre has moved on since then. Call of Duty 2 is a good example of an objective based shooter and does a wonderful job of rewarding the player for completing their goals. And when you’ve got that competing on the same system, a game like Perfect Dark Zero pales by comparison.
Many weapons come equipped with a trusty scope.
The AI is rather questionable too, with some potentially good levels ruined by it. Take Mission 7 for example, a stage that could have been a superb stealth-orientated mission that’s spoilt entirely by the AI. There’s a large room in the middle portion of the stage where there are cameras everywhere. Having made your way very slowly through the room, eliminating all the cameras with a silenced pistol, it was crushing to have a pack of guards suddenly attack. Were you seen by a camera? No. Heard by a guard? No. So where is the justification of suddenly being attacked when Sam Fisher would have been proud of your stealthy route through the building? If a game contains stealth sections, why punish the player for being silent?
It’s not all bad though. The range of weaponry on offer is impressive in both quality and quantity, with an arsenal that includes some delightfully original secondary fire modes. Old favourites like the Laptop Gun are back (complete with wall-mounted turret of course) but some of the newer weapons are even more inspiring. There’s an SMG with a hologram function that projects a copy of your own self to fool enemies, a rifle with cloaking abilities (similar to the one in the original game) and there’s even a gun that will drug enemies so that they turn on each other when hit. There are also swords, shields and spinning blade discs in the mix too, along with the usual selection of pistols, shotguns, grenade launchers and sniper rifles. You could argue the point that a couple of the guns are a little too similar to each other, but for the most part the weapon selection on offer is Perfect Dark Zero’s biggest strength.
The same can’t be said however for the vehicles, which are uniformly dire. It’s probably not so much the fault of the vehicles themselves, although they don’t exactly handle well by any degree but more in the way that they are used. The vehicles, like a lot of the game, feel like they were thrown in just so they can tick off a box on a ‘things to include in an FPS’ checklist. Flying has rarely worked well in an FPS and Perfect Dark Zero’s jetpack certainly doesn’t. The Banshee in Halo 2 controlled very well and the levels offered the kind of space needed to make them a successful addition. With the jetpacks here, control is clumsy and the environments unsuitable, and it’s the same situation with the hovercraft.
Thankfully they can be turned off in the multiplayer, which co-incidentally is by far the strongest portion of the game. It plays a little like the old N64 game but more like the PC classic Counter Strike. There’s a wide selection of modes on offer to suit your multiplayer needs, each split into 2 styles of game. The ‘Deathmatch’ setting contains Killcount, which is your typical Deathmatch mode, and that can be played in teams along with games like CTF and Territories. The ‘Dark Ops’ mode however borrows heavily from Counter Strike. Using the same weapon purchase system at the start of the round you can play team elimination games as well as Sabotage where you try to cause as much damage to the other team’s base as possible. Onslaught has you defending a base for a set time limit against a respawning team carrying weaker weapons while Infection is a PALGN favourite. Here it’s a free-for-all game where you must avoid being killed by the skeleton players. Should you die you then become a skeleton and hunt down the rest of the ‘living’ players. Only if you survive the round do you get any points.
Gotta love the X-ray vision mode.
The maps on offer are huge, present some nice variety in environments and contain a couple of smaller maps within them by cleverly changing the boundaries around each area. Still, with just six maps you can’t help feel a little shortchanged. Even moreso when people generally avoid two of the poorest ones (Temple and Desert), leaving only four. There may be more to come through the Live Marketplace, but we’re four months on from the USA release and there hasn’t been any word yet. On the plus side, the game runs like a dream on Xbox Live. When creating a room it’s easy to fill it with 16-32 players without it lagging. How it does that is a mystery; whether it’s just amazing netcode or whether it denies access to anyone with insufficient upload speed (which would explain the connection problems many have), it’s impressive either way as it’s refreshing playing a large game on Xbox Live without having to worry about lag.
On a technical ground, Perfect Dark Zero is as equally inconsistent as the rest of the game. Visually it can look very impressive at times. Super sharp texturing, eye catching environments and well modelled weaponry certainly give the game a next-gen look about it in parts. Plus the framerate is notably solid. But in other areas it’s disappointingly bland-looking. Lighting and shadowing appears incredibly basic and while the intentional almost cartoon-esque art style suits the game, it doesn’t excuse flat uses of colour or boxy geometry throughout the game.
Aurally, it's also a mixed bag. The soundtrack has that Rare quality and the general sound effects compliment the game well, but the voice acting is pure torture. Which is surprisingly really, given that Kameo contains some superb vocal work. Perhaps Rare's entire acting budget went on that, because the in game chatter in Perfect Dark Zero is hideous. On a related note, the 5.1 positioning does seem a little off, especially in multiplayer. There are times where it sounds like you’re getting shot from behind when in reality they’re to the side of you. It’s not a huge problem, but it does get confusing at times and really shouldn’t be happening when games like Halo and Rainbow Six 3 got it right perfectly on the original Xbox.
So after five years of waiting, it’s clear, at least from this, that Rare isn’t quite the same company it used to be when it comes to first person shooters. From just a few hours of play you get the feeling that although they’ve taken the basic elements that made their N64 games such a hit (the wide array of weaponry, the mission objectives, etc) something just isn’t right. The twitchy control, the inconsistent level design quality and the far from impressive AI puts Perfect Dark Zero’s single player campaign well within the depths of mediocrity. It has its moments, but they’re too few and far between to recommend this game at full price for anything other than multiplayer use.
As a multiplayer game it’s solid. Not fantastic, not great even, but enjoyable enough to warrant putting time into. With lots of options, a wealth of weapons, and lots of modes to play around with, it’s one of the stronger 360 games when it comes to online play, especially given how smooth it runs. Having said that, if the Call of Duty 2 multiplayer patch is released soon it would be very easy to suggest skipping on this completely, even more so with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Battlefield and Far Cry on the near horizon. A few months ago things were different, but with those games arriving soon the whole Perfect Dark Zero thing is all a little redundant now.
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