Review by: Jeff Burke
Published: December 21, 2005

Perfect Dark is the international multi-million selling Nintendo64 title in which secret agent Joanna Dark battles the evil dataDyne corporation and their equally nefarious alien allies. The recently released Xbox360 title, Perfect Dark Zero aims to create the back story that shows how Joanna become that secret agent and the circumstances that placed her in a position of both power and garnered animosity towards these evil corporations. Included in that is introducing characters only spoken of, like her father Jack Dark.

Following in the footsteps of the original, Perfect Dark Zero is a first person shooter in which stealth is rewarded as much, if not more, as all out gun blazing action is. Toting an arsenal of over 20 weapons to choose from including your normal weapons of the genre; pistols, assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, and of course rocket launchers, Perfect Dark Zero employs a weapon size system that limits the size or the quantity of weapons that you can carry. With a maximum space of four “units”, weapons like the rocket launcher or normally mounted M60 take up 3 of these slots, leaving room for a small pistol or throwable item like a grenade or a flash bang. Playing on the angle of stealthy agent, Joanna is equipped with data stealing apparatuses, microphone binoculars, and universal key like lock picks.

From a mission and map standpoint, Rare does exactly what they did in the original Nintendo64 title… push the hardware to its currently known limits. Levels are large with no additional load time once loaded and are each vibrant in color and unique in design. Of the 12 missions you really only see the same genre level about three or four of those times; traveling from underwater complexes to temples and jungles to urban cities all while changing up from a pure stealth get-in-get-out mission to a full-on assault mission without having the feeling of level design repetition so commonly found among First Person Shooters.

Navigating these maps and missions is accomplished often without the use of radar, but instead with an “Oops wrong way” detection, that gives you waypoints drawn almost transparently along the ground. Missing also from the missions is often a clear cut understandable objective or an understanding of why you are doing it, but really most of the single player seems to be a training exercise for the Xbox Live component.