Perfect Dark Zero Review

Let’s start off by putting all of the hype surrounding Perfect Dark Zero off to the side. There will be no talk of killer aps, system sellers, and Halo in this review, well, after this sentence that is. Starting … … … now! OK, I usually don’t start off a review by talking about a game’s presentation and graphics, but in the case of Perfect Dark Zero it’s really a necessity. When you fire up the game for the first time you can’t help but notice how slickly put together the whole thing is before you even kick off your first game. Seriously, this game has an entire introductory sequence that is an obvious homage to the opening credit sequences of James Bond movies while simultaneously putting them to shame. Most of the time it takes a game about fifteen seconds or so to get me to start looking for a “skip” button, but with Perfect Dark Zero I sat there mesmerized by the whole thing. Then came the menus, which really look slick and in HD look so sharp and so very cool. Alright, alright, you know it’s a very well-produced game, but I bet what you really want to know is how well it plays.

Well, you’ll have to bear with me for just a bit longer here because I need to get the story’s basics out of the way. In Perfect Dark Zero you are bounty hunter Joanna Dark, a gun for hire who is just as deadly as she is sexy. The words “bounty hunter” may evoke a picture of a burly guy in a leather vest and cowboy hat who packs a shotgun and chews tobacco (well to me, at least), but you’d be way off base here. Joanna looks like she is ready to club hop between the hottest spots in town and she’s better equipped than MI6. Anyway, you get it, hot super-spy type who collects bounties for a living, on with the story. The story takes place in the near future in a world that is under the tight control of giant corporations. One of these corporations is dataDyne and Joanna and her team soon learn that they plan to distribute software with a deadly side-effect to the entire world. What they’re really up to is something that you as Joanna Dark will have to find out for yourself. If you do, then let me know because the story is a bit convoluted. However, if we were all playing games for their plotlines we’d all be stuck hunting pixels in adventure games right now. Shiver.

OK, phew, we’re finally ready to take a look at the gameplay. Well, the single player gameplay at least. Perfect Dark Zero is a first-person shooter that is most akin to various first-person shooter secret agent games that have come before it. Pure running and gunning will get you killed pretty quickly, so stealth and discretion are more prudent approaches. If you’re trigger happy, don’t worry; I’m not talking Splinter Cell here and you’ll still find yourself in plenty of shootouts. Overall Perfect Dark Zero is a mix of realistic and conventional action. On the realism side your carrying capacity is limited so you won’t be able to carry every gun you come across in the game. Also, the guns don’t have gigantic magazines and they take a realistic amount of time to load. On the flipside, a more liberal approach is taken where your health is concerned. If you are hit and become injured you can get out of harm’s way for a bit and your health will recover automatically. Take too much damage and your max health will start to decline, so the health mechanism used in the game is not a license to approach things Rambo-style.

Perfect Dark Zero is one of the few modern shooters out there that doesn’t let you jump. This definitely feels a bit odd at first, but the game provides you with a few other moves that take the place of jumping. The first is a diving roll that is executed with the left button. Rolling will make it harder for enemies to hit you, but before you start thinking about rolling your way through an entire level I have to warn you that when you do get hit while rolling you’ll take extra damage. Another new move in the game is the ability to fire from cover. When you pass by an object or obstruction that can be used for cover, the game will prompt you to press the A button to make use of the cover. You can then move your aiming reticule to line up your shots and when you pull the trigger you’ll pop up to take your shots and then duck back under cover. It’s a pretty cool feature although I found that in some spots it seemed that I didn’t fire at the same spot I was aiming for before I began shooting.

The game features a lot of cool little touches and when you see them you wonder why they haven’t appeared that much before in other games. For example, some enemies will wear helmets and body armor. If you make a head shot on an enemy wearing a helmet, you might knock the helmet off but you won’t kill him. Similarly, as you shoot an enemy wearing an armor vest, the vest will show visible signs of damage as you hit it. Your enemies are pretty talkative goons, and you’ll hear them chatter a lot during firefights. They’ll taunt you, yell out your location to their comrades, and even take notice when you have to pause and reload. The enemy AI is average for the genre, but touches like these make it seem that much more real.

The missions and their locals provide a good amount of variety and provide for some fun gameplay, but this fun is tempered by the game’s save system. The game is only ever saved after a level is completed, which means that once you start playing you better have the time to commit to what could be a lengthy mission because you won’t be able to save your game in mid-mission. The game does have mid-mission checkpoints, so you don’t have to go back to the beginning should you die. However, when you’re killed you’re given a message telling you that the game will no longer track your stats. The reason for this is that the game will measure your performance against other players by uploading your mission score to Xbox Live. This is a cool feature, but to take advantage of it you need to make it from the beginning to the end of a mission without dying. Why not add deaths as one of the stats? Or is this too simple a solution? OK, break the stat tracking up into segments and only require that a player live from checkpoint to checkpoint. It was really frustrating for me to have to restart a long mission because I ran into a surprise at its end just to benchmark my performance. I eventually gave up on the whole rating thing, which I was OK with since I still get a little creepy Big Brother vibe from the new Xbox Live.

OK, back to the good stuff. I really have to say that Perfect Dark Zero looks fantastic. The game is simply packed with details down to the rings on Joanna’s fingers and the polish on her nails. There’s a full physics engine at work in the game and some great rag doll animations. Damage on enemies is location-based, so if you hit someone in the leg he’ll clutch at the wound and begin limping. And the environments themselves are fantastic and really show off the horsepower under the 360’s hood.