Perfect Dark Zero (Xbox 360) - Part 2

This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing a little more about Perfect Dark Zero.

If you want to read part one, click HERE.

I mentioned last time that Perfect Dark Zero had a bit of a troubled development, but that seems to be true for all the Perfect Dark games to an extent. Even the first game had its problems, as half the team left Rare to start Free Radical Design and make TimeSplitters.

Somehow Perfect Dark  and TimeSplitters both released in 2000, and both continued the spirit of Rare's legendary GoldenEye 007. But Perfect Dark came out late in the Nintendo 64's life and was made by N64 veterans who'd had years to learn the system inside and out, while TimeSplitters was basically a janky stripped-down PlayStation 2 launch title.

Five years later, both games got sequels but this time the situations were reversed. Free Radical's TimeSplitters: Future Perfect showed off what the venerable PS2-era consoles were capable of in the hands of experts, while Perfect Dark Zero was reworked in a hurry to become a launch title for the shiny new and unfamiliar Xbox 360.

And none of these first-person shooters ever got a release on PC, what the hell guys?

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Previously, in Perfect Dark Zero:

Absolutely nothing has happened yet. Seriously.

I played through Mission 0, infiltrating a underwater base, blowing up the CPU and then escaping with some guy I met outside, but it turned out to be a training simulation. Maybe the real world will have better graphics, I suppose I'll find out.

And now, the continuation:

This time I'm doing a real mission, with a mission briefing and everything! Turns out that a scientist called Zeigler has been kidnapped by the Triads, and Jack intends to kidnap him right back. All Joanna needs to do this time is I.D. three enforcers on patrol outside a nightclub (marked by the yellow circles). 

I'm assuming that Jack is the guy I met at the end of the simulator mission, though in the field he'll be called Point Forward. Meanwhile Joanna will be called Dark Zero, which is a terrible callsign as Dark's her actual last name. Also it means the logo's wrong and the game's not Perfect Dark 'Zero', it's Perfect 'Dark Zero'.

I don't know if Chandra gets a nickname but I'm sure she'll continue to be the voice in my ear, as every FPS protagonist needs one.

Thanks game, I appreciate the reminder. Also I like the basic Game and Watch-style animation of Joanna smacking this poor guy with the butt of her rifle.

MISSION 1 - NIGHTCLUB STAKEOUT

Here we go, a bit of a proper cutscene for once and I finally get to see Chandra. Well, almost. Skin tends to look better when there's any light reflecting off it. This is with the brightness up as well!

I wish I could put subtitles on so you could at least see that she's talking right now. Plus Joanna's finally talking as well and... I think I liked the first game's voice actor better.

Chandra's going to stay in the speedboat so she can make a quick escape if necessary. Meanwhile Joanna's getting off at the dock to use her audioscope to get positive I.D. on the enforcers. Jack's given me strict instructions to stay out of the club and use the gun only as a last resort.

You don't see a lot of FPS protagonists with purple nail polish. Also I like how I can hear the club music from outside. Lots of bass right now.

I walked straight up to a guy sitting on the boxes in front of me, thinking I could sneak up and put a bullet in the back of his head. He saw me though and yelled "We got an intruder", and then the shooting started.

It's fine, I think I can get away with it.

Oh, I've apparently alerted Enforcer #1, as Chandra's telling me that I blew it and it's giving me a little picture-in-picture window to show a live feed of him coming after me.

I've never been great at stealth but this may be a new record for how quickly I've screwed a mission up. Took me about 6 seconds to get spotted and 10 seconds for the shooting to start. In my defence, Joanna's a very noticeable person.

Can I keep on going though? This isn't a mission failure? Uh, alright then!

Oh, that's a nice detail texture on these bricks. 

Also that 'cover' icon just appeared again letting me know I can hide behind this wall. It's been a long time since I've seen that, maybe because I don't deliberately walk into walls a lot. Can't say I was struggling without cover on Mission 0.

Hang on, a bunch of enemies just started shooting me from behind, so I need to sort them out so I can get back to sneaking around entirely unnoticed.

Damn, I think there's five of them down here. Well, four now. The tricky part is seeing them.

These graphics remind me so much of Deus Ex: Invisible War right now. Though the game actually uses its own proprietary in-house engine, with a bit of Havoc physics bolted onto the side.

Incidentally I like how enemies shout out things like "She's reloading". One guy came over without a weapon and said "Want to be my new punch bug?" Uh, no mate, I want to shoot you, that's why I just reloaded. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.

This place has gotten very quiet. Not literally though, I can still hear the club music. I think it's "Limelight" by Kepi and Kat if you want to look it up.

Well I was specifically instructed to not go inside the club, so I suppose I'll go down the road to the side where all those cars are parked.

Racing game developers put a ton of effort into making their cars look amazing, it's a top priority for them. It's not a top priority for FPS devs however, and I've noticed that cars that show up in this era can look a little less impressive than your average Gran Turismo model. 

Hey these cars are pretty good, though not very futuristic. They don't look like they have a hover mode.

Okay I'm going to try to quickly snipe these three guys with my silenced sniper pistol without alerting everyone else outside. They haven't seen me yet so I'll get a second before they react to the first shot.

And... I actually pulled it off! All that practice I got in TimeSplitters 3 is paying off.

Hey, a line of blue arrows have appeared on the ground and they want me to head to this door. Maybe this has more in common with racing games than I thought.

The Nightdive remaster of Quake II added breadcrub navigation trails like this as well and it makes so much of a difference when you're lost and bored of wandering in circles. A map would've been nice too!

It's got a lockpicking minigame as well! This one's even simpler than the hacking minigame, as I just move the stick until I find the correct angle to make the colour on my lockpick device turn green.

Though it also needs to be mentioned that my lockpick device is called a 'locktopus'

Oh that was a beautiful shot. One-hit-kill pistol headshot. It was pretty too, with the muzzle flash lighting up my other gun.

I don't even need an aim mode with these pistols, they're so accurate and steady that when the crosshair turns red I know my target's going down, even from this distance. In fact I'm not sure what the auto-aim's doing, as it feels like I'm the one doing all the work here.

Aww what? But I didn't even kill the enforcer yet! I was aiming at his friend. Man, some games just have to keep putting roadblocks in the way of my fun. Chandra's giving me an earful right now, asking if I'm even listening to her. The answer is 'no, I'm not'.

Two enforcers alerted means mission failure, so I'm going to have to restart. Unless it saved a checkpoint for me? I know Perfect Dark didn't have them, but that was five years ago. Plus it says 'checkpoint' on the menu screen.

Anyway, who even cares about the single player mode? The multiplayer is where this game shines! Allegedly!

The developers had to cut it back a little from what were hoping for, but it still supports 32 players, and can be played via Xbox Live, system link or even old school split screen. I'm pretty sure they don't mean all 32 players on one TV, as that obviously wouldn't work. Though that said, each tiny screen would be about 213x120 pixels... that's almost Game Boy sized.

I haven't figured out to switch my character model yet, but I can switch modes. There's deathmatch and its variations like capture the flag, but there's also another mode called DarkOps. The interesting thing about DarkOps mode is... that don't know anything about it yet, other than it's "Tactical round-based combat!"

I'll start with a 4 vs 1 team deathmatch against bots, playing with standard weapons on the classic Felicity map from GoldenEye.

Okay that's weird. I didn't expect to be put in room full of guns and have to wait to spawn into the level.

I'm going to run around and grab as many as I can! Oh wait, I can't, the game's got a weapon limit. Uh... I'll have a FAC-16 then, because it looks like an M-4 carbine.

Oh no, they put the dodge roll move into the multiplayer and the bots know how to use it! Well, that's going to make deathmatch awkward.

It was already difficult enough to do enough sustained damage to enemies to break their armour and get through their regenerating health, without them having a 'don't get hit' button. 

They have no trouble getting my health down though, because I'm rubbish. And then I'm put back into the spawn room! I don't know why the designers thought it'd be a good idea to make the player wait for a countdown before they can respawn, but it's just making me impatient. I'll have to remember to turn it off.

There's a bit of per-object motion blur for you. Perfect Dark Zero is apparently one of the first games to ever feature the effect and it does make it look a bit... distinctive. It's like they made plastic models of all the characters and then photographed them 

The way the effect is achieved means the edges of an object aren't properly transparent, so you get sharper outlines than you'd want. But the advantage is that it properly smears the pixels of the object across the distance they've moved between frames, like anti-aliasing except for time instead of resolution, and avoids the distinct echoes of previous frames you get in PS2-era motion blur.

Grand Theft Auto III (PS2)

You can see here how Grand Theft Auto III fakes its motion blur by just overlaying a bunch of previous frames with the opacity reduced. Metal Gear Solid 2 loves this trick as well. It makes everything look very dreamlike at low frame rates and isn't particularly great even with more samples.

Anyway I've been seeing this blur effect a lot in multiplayer because the bots all keep running up to me! It's really difficult to keep my gun pointed at a target that's right up in my face.

Look how close they are, they just don't respect my personal space at all. 

It makes these normal difficulty bots a lot harder to kill than the ones in Perfect Dark, or in the TimeSplitters games. For me at least.

Something else that's different from Perfect Dark is that the enemies wear armour over their character model, and it shatters when you break it. You can see the pieces lying around the floor. The downside of this is that all the character models are covered up in armour, which kind of defeats the point of playing as a specific person.

7 kills and 12 deaths, not my best result. I don't know what TrueSkill is, but a score of 1 sounds about right for me. In my defence, all 7 of those kills were headshots.

Okay I'm going to try one of the new multiplayer levels, called Urban. The game lets you pick a level variant as well, which opens and closes areas to create different maps. But have no idea what the layout is to begin with so I'll just switch it to "Base 2+4 open".

Hey this time there's a minimap on the radar! Plus it tells me where I am (Shrine Gardens in this case), which is handy as this place is huge. I have to hike through a maze of hallways to find anyone.

It's nice to see somewhere new, but I think I've seen enough of this mode for now. Plus I miss music! The single player campaign has a soundtrack while all you get in multiplayer is sound effects.

Alright what was I doing, listening to enforcers or something?

MISSION 1 - NIGHTCLUB STAKEOUT (AGAIN)

To do this mission correctly I need to sneak up on each of these enforcers without alerting them, and then use the audioscope on them. For extra tension I'm standing out in the open right now, hoping that the bar fills up before a patrol finds me.

Target identification confirmed! Great, one down. Now I need to get elsewhere.

SOON

Once I'd gotten two of the enforcers the game gave me a new primary objective: locate Jack Dark. Hang on, his last name is Dark? Is Jack her dad? Wow, that seems like important information I should've already known.

Alright I'm not sure where to go, but I see a ladder so I know what I'm going to try first.

I climbed up into a crane and... I couldn't do anything with it so I left. Then I unlocked a door leading to a back alley, went up in a lift, and used a nearby zipline!

Hell yeah, you know you're doing something right when they film your stunt from two different angles.

Actually, hang on, I'm back where I started, in the place with the ladder. Never mind.

The game eventually took pity on me and gave me some more blue arrows, this time leading me to the front door of the club. But I was specifically told not to go in there!

New goal: Evacuate the civilians. Fortunately walking through a metal detector and setting it off sorted out that problem. Or not? They're running out but it doesn't seem to count. 

Aha, I set off the fire alarm and that did the job. Though it also means I'm stuck listening to a fire alarm now, which kind of sucks. 

Oh here's something interesting that I just learned: my regenerating health only regenerates up to a point. You can see at the top that due to my many mistakes my maximum health is now less than half the bar. And my current health is only half of that!

My latest error of judgement was to think I could tank a bit of damage from this invisible sentry gun in order to blow it up. Mission over. At least now I get to see what happens when I load a checkpoint.

I started outside the club, with the objective "Locate Jack Dark", and all the enemies out here seem to be back for some reason. This time I just sniped the turret before it started shooting, job done. Oh crap, there's another turret around the corner!

Oh, turns out Jack is actually doing fine! He's got evil nightclub owner Killian at gunpoint and he's ready to walk out with Zeigler.

Unfortunately Joanna doesn't know that and her arrival gives Killian the distraction he needs to knock Jack's gun out of his hand, shoot him, and do a barrel roll out of the window.

He just does a little twirl, lands on the street below and then walks away, like he's been practicing the move.

Jack's not particularly happy about this, and Jo's awkward attempts to console him with the hand she's holding her loaded pistol in just annoy him further. But he's still alive and we have Zeigler. Mission over!

Hang on, the story continues on the mission briefing screen like an audio drama. I should probably be paying attention to this or else I won't have a clue what's going on.

Turns out that Zeigler's been doing research into some dangerous stuff and now we need to get it back. Though Zeigler himself will be sitting this one out, as he's somehow more injured than Jack is. Zeigler promises them that Carrington will pay them well for this, which surprises Jack because he's got beef with the guy for some reason. Seems like Chandra decided to take his job against Jack's wishes because they really need the money. I guess whatever it is they do doesn't generally pay that well.

So Jack's going to protect Zeigler and Joanna's going to go to his safehouse to get his case. Works for me, I hate escort missions.

MISSION 2 - SUBWAY RETRIEVAL

Joanna headed down to a underground carpark and then suddenly rock music happened and folks rode in on bikes to murder her!

Fortunately it's one of those carparks that's full of exploding red barrels, so that's helping me speed things along. Hey I just noticed that the 'cover' icon is making a rare appearance. To be fair I haven't been trying to make it appear, I've just been playing it like a regular FPS.

You know what I haven't noticed though? The auto-aim doing a damn thing. I turned it off to see if it made a difference and I feel like I'm equally as bad at getting bullets to land on target. I'll leave it off for a bit and then turn it back on and see if I can notice the difference.

LATER

Hey the carpark level is also eventually a ruined train station level! Don't ask me how the train got wrecked like this, it was like this when I got here.

Incidentally, the glass shattering effects in this are a bit of a let down. 

TimeSplitters

They're not as good as TimeSplitters I'm afraid. It let me walk down the inside of the crashed train shooting bad guys though, so I'll forgive it.

I got Zeigler his damn briefcase in the end, but then he suddenly pulled a device out of it and zapped Jack! Man, Jack does not do well in cutscenes. Also Zeigler collapsed so I guess he's dead now?

The mission briefing afterwards reveals that Chandra's waiting with the powerboat half a klick away, so the two of us need to get across the rooftops, through the storm drain, and then meet up with her so we can get out of here.

MISSION 3 - ROOFTOPS ESCAPE

Alright it seems this level is going to be about protecting Jack from the rooftops as he runs down the street. I can see three people down at the bottom of the screen who need a bullet put in them and this gun is more than capable of doing it.

Wait, I lost? What did I do wrong? Who killed Jack?

Oh I see, they've got snipers up here on my level as well. Okay, next time I'm going to try to sprint across the rooftops, killing all the snipers up here and I'll leave the guys in the street for Jack to deal with. I've got a radar full of red markers so it shouldn't be too hard to find them.

Oh come on, again? Who shot Jack this time? Well... at least the restarts are quick.

I kind of hate this level to be honest, but I also like how tense it is and somehow I'm actually starting to get into it.

There was a level in TimeSplitters 2 where I had to race to protect "maidens" who kept dying off-screen and I wasn't keen on that one bit, but here I know enough about what I did wrong that I'm actually motivated to do better. I just need to learn which enemies need shooting first and when I should lower my scope and rush to the next area.

The dramatic spy movie music they've got playing on this level helps. Turns out that Rare is actually pretty good with its soundtracks.

LATER

Man, this level just keeps going. It only seems to have the one checkpoint though, annoyingly, so I really need to not screw up this boss fight.

Killian turned up again in a dropship (I know it's a dropship because he keeps dropping people off), and I can't escape in the boat until I've gotten rid of it. I shot the engines until they started smoking, but the thing doesn't have a health bar so I'm not sure if I should switch targets or carry on what I'm doing. The game isn't giving me much feedback here, but I haven't ran out of patience  yet so I'll stick with it.

Hey something I did worked! The level is complete and all is well. Okay Jack got captured by the enemy, but it's a Perfect Dark Zero cutscene, so something bad was bound to happen to him. In fact this seems like a good place to turn this off.

MISSION 4 - MANSION INFILTRATION

Huh, I feel like I just walked into the start of No One Lives Forever 2. Oh, am I in the snowy mountains now? Maybe I'll keep playing just a little longer...

Actually no, this level is really harsh. I'm supposed to kill an enemy for his radio and call for radio silence so they'll stop bringing in reinforcements, but every time I put the gun down to make a call I'm swarmed by reinforcements. It's making my very aware just how tiny my regenerating health bar is.

CONCLUSION

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Perfect Dark Zero is somehow both a notorious train wreck, and a critical and commercial success. It's like a Duke Nukem Forever that actually released at the right moment in history to work. 

It feels very of its time, doing what games like this were expected to be doing. It's got the standard regenerating health, plus the standard weapon limit, which works great for a military shooter but not so well in a spy game with quirky gimmick guns. It's got checkpoints this time as well, though it could've had a lot more in my opinion as it's as stingy with them as TimeSplitters 2 is. The developers clearly disagreed with me on this one however, as raising the difficulty takes checkpoints away! It also adds extra objectives though, so that bit of GoldenEye/Perfect Dark DNA remains. And this time it's not as frustratingly vague about what it expects you to do! It even gives you a navigation trail to follow when it realises that you're lost. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect doesn't have that. Though it typically doesn't need it.

I've heard people call the game sluggish and awkward to control, and yeah that seems plausible. Personally I don't typically play first-person shooters with a controller, so I don't have any firm preconceptions about what a game like this should feel like. But it's definitely less slick than Future Perfect was for me and I noticed that the shooting isn't much like GoldenEye 007 anymore. I mean even outside of aim mode. GoldenEye doesn't even have a crosshair unless you need it, you just point at an enemy and the bullets generally end up going where you need them to. Perfect Dark continued in that style but Perfect Dark Zero expects you to fine tune your aim to get your shots on target, while people are shooting you. I got into the habit of moving instead of turning, strafing sidewards to slide my sights directly onto an enemy's head.

GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and the TimeSplitters games are all known for having multiplayer modes as good as, or even better than, the campaign and I'd heard that Perfect Dark Zero is no exception. But I didn't have much fun with the deathmatch to be honest. Maybe it would've worked better if I'd gotten 31 of my friends to join me, but what I played was just frustrating, with bots rushing right up in my face. And if you're judging it on the amount of levels and characters it has, basically everything beats it, especially Future Perfect. That even has has a Map Maker feature to create your own levels from pre-fabricated sections, and this does not. Though they all have co-op! Alas Perfect Dark's counter-operative mode, where Player 2 controls an enemy, didn't make a return.

It's a previous gen game hurriedly upgraded into a launch title, so it's simultaneously dated and experimental. But even though the game's got a bit of an Invisible War vibe to its visuals, it can look pretty good at times. They knew what they were doing with those skyscrapers on the skyline. In fact I was happy with any new location they gave me. Travelling the world is great, especially when you have a level select. 

Unfortunately I don't think the look always meshes well with the original Perfect Dark's aesthetic, and it did a poor job of convincing me that this is the actual Joanna Dark, fighting against the actual dataDyne. It may as well be an entirely different setting. Same with the music. Sounds good, doesn't always sound like it fits.

Plus the cutscenes are a bit janky compared to Future Perfect, which is a generation behind in hardware but often feels more sophisticated. And the way the way half the story's carried by off-screen conversations during the mission briefings didn't really work for me. At least give me a little Codec call faces to look at!

On the positive side, at least you can still buy and play this on modern hardware, it's even included in Rare Replay. In fact you can purchase Future Perfect as well. You can't buy either of them for PC, but at least they haven't been abandoned. Though if you have choose between them, I'd say go with Future Perfect. This is far from soulless slop and it even has a few good ideas that weren't borrowed from earlier titles. But with its difficulty spikes, awkward aiming and limited checkpoints, it shot through my patience faster than it could regenerate my interest.

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Thanks for reading!

Next on Super Adventures, it's nothing to do with TimeSplitters or Perfect Dark. Unless I'm playing the Game Boy Color game. There's a clue on the left, you tell me.

Also let us know what you think about Perfect Dark Zero. Is it a misunderstood classic or a Rare misstep?