Perfect Dark Zero - First Play

My name is Joanna Dark. I am an assassin. I am a mercenary. I am an aficionado of sassy dressing. I am all of these things. My “career” has always required a steely persona and razor-honed reflexes. Turning off my emotions has been a necessity. However, my mission tomorrow with Jack and Chandra has me worried. The nightclub scene was never something I’ve been into, and the idea of infiltrating a thug-filled one in broad daylight makes my fingers twitch. My trigger fingers, to be more precise. There is nothing worse than barreling into a room full of gyrating civilians with the idea of a surgical strike. I’m anticipating complications.

Speaking of complications, my relationship with Jack has been pretty weird lately. He’s taken a completely irrational protective attitude toward me that I haven’t seen in him before. Especially since my simulation scores are 15% higher than his. I guess this nightclub mission has him about as spooked as I am.

When Rare’s Golden Eye was released on the Nintendo 64 I was 20 years old and on my second year in college. The N64 launch had been a big deal for me, and one of the few consoles I ran out and bought on release day. Rare was one of the premier console developers of the time, and I was no exception in their loyal fan base. Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct had been two of my all time favorite games on the SNES. Unfortunately, being dirt poor at the time of Golden Eye’s release, I had to resort to my next door neighbor’s copy. He was even a bigger Nintendo fan boy than I was.

I vividly recall the four player deathmatches we had instead of studying, throwing knives at each other in blocky hallways long into the night. Golden Eye and its spiritual sequel, Perfect Dark, are still considered to be two of the most influential console titles in their genre. I’ve even been known to pull out Golden Eye occasionally at our LAN parties. The launch hype along with Rare’s history definitely put the pressure on them to produce a killer game for Microsoft’s 360. Unfortunately, my experience so far falls quite a bit short of my expectations.

While walking through the first tutorial rooms in Perfect Dark Zero, which contained little more than a desk and a shiny wall, my problems began. I know I was happy with 15-20 frames per second in the N64 era, but that was 9 years ago. A constant 30 fps is vital to holding a modern console shooter together. This becomes especially important with the precedent set by the 360’s Call of Duty 2, which strives for a consistent 60 fps. Anything less can make you feel like you’re wading through a giant vat of pea soup with somebody else’s coke-bottle glasses strapped to your head. I would have been much happier with a few less graphical effects turned on and a solid framerate. Does it really affect my experience if the shadow from that elevator button is rendered in real time or not? Not exactly.

Having played a ton of Golden Eye, I can vouch for the singular feel of Perfect Dark Zero. Rare’s signature is all over this game. The weapon design, over-the-top characters, 60’s spyplotation roots, and stilted death animations have Rare written all over them. The level design has also been above-average with considerable variation in architectural detail. For instance, I found myself in the first two levels going from a towering rocket, to a dance club complete with disco balls and laser light shows. The levels also have non-linear elements to them, with multiple paths to the same goal. If you get lost, the game also provides a friendly blinking set of arrows to guide you to your next objective, or to your partner in the case of cooperative mode.

Besides the framerate issues, the graphics in Perfect Dark Zero do look fantastic. There is bump-mapping, specular highlighting, high dynamic range lighting, motion blur, and real-time shadows on every exposed surface. The motion blur and HDR lighting are my favorite graphical features. The motion blur goes a long way to cover up some of the frame rate problems, and the HDR lighting really adds generous helpings of atmosphere to this game. A lot of blindingly bright lights are used along corridors and succeed in creating a visually intense environment. The two sticking points graphically are the character models, which look something like oily Barbie dolls and the frame tearing, which makes cutscene watching a very flickery experience.

In my first play session with Perfect Dark Zero, the spot-on fps control really stood out. Especially because the game picked up that I’m left-handed from my profile, and applied the correct control settings automatically. Perfect Dark Zero also offers an option that significantly increases your turn speed when the joystick is cranked all the way over. This is a nice addition to traditional console fps controls, and feels tight. The button placement is very similar to Halo 2, with one glaringly obvious error. The Y button is used both for cycling through your weapons, and for picking up a new weapon. So guess what happens if you try to change from shotgun to sniper while you happen to be standing on the world’s crappiest pistol? That’s right; you pick up the pistol, leaving you looking at the weapon-littered floor for your shotgun, like a Christmas shopper short one contact lens on black Friday.

Perfect Dark zero adds a couple new features to the console shooter, which were conveniently explained to me in the tutorial mission. I was pretty skeptical about covering and rolling at first; strafing around corners is something I’ve been doing since Wolfenstien 3d, so I didn’t feel like I really needed a cover system. Covering works by popping up a context sensitive button press whenever you’re next to an object you can take cover behind, which is pretty much any object or wall in the game. Some cover is even destroyable, leading to some very tense shootouts. However, covering can seem a little bit like cheating sometimes, since you can line up your targeting reticule from cover, then pop out quickly and take out the bad guys before they know what hit them.

The dodging button takes the place of a jump button in Perfect Dark Zero and causes your character to roll in any direction. The camera pops out of first person mode briefly to do this, but I suffered no camera twitch nausea from this. The dodges are actually quite useful, especially when used to dive behind cover, and do add something to the game that plain Jane jumping wouldn’t. I do still miss jumping though. Arial maneuvers have always been an intricate (if unrealistic) addition to FPS gameplay.

Another big plus for Perfect Dark Zero is the weapon inventory system and alternate fire modes. Most of the weapons feel useful and there is so much innovation in the alternate fire department that I don’t even know where to begin. One pistol, for instance, features an alternate attack which has you pulling out the clip of the weapon and throwing it, causing the ammunition to go off like a string of firecrackers (confusing the audio sensing abilities of your human and AI opponents alike). Most of the weapons feature nice innovative alternate modes like this one, and some weapons even have a tertiary fire mode, to throw a third option into those intense fire fights.

The weapon inventory system also adds a layer of strategy. It takes the Halo 2 double weapon approach a step further into RPG territory by using a slot storage system. A pistol takes up one slot while a high powered rifle or rocket launcher takes up all four of your slots. This means you can pack dual wielded pistols along with a small two-handed smg, or choose to forgo everything for a powerful single weapon. It’s really a shame that some of the genius of the inventory system is tempered by the frustration I’ve had with accidentally picking up weapons with the dual-purpose Y button.

After three single player missions and a couple hours of multiplayer I’m feeling pretty mediocre about Perfect Dark Zero. Overall, I think the multiplayer portions of this game are going to be the most fun, especially Xbox Live Coop. It’s also worth noting, that I haven’t tried the game yet at regular definition, and it’s very possible that the frame rates will improve in this mode. Tune into my next play rating for my experiences with the rest of the single player campaign and the much touted coop modes.