InsaneBear

Review: Perfect Dark (XBLA)

Score: Good
Difficulty played on: Special Agent (middle difficulty)
Time to beat: Around 10 hours
Loved the most: The fact that this game is still innovative 10 years after its initial release. The music was superb too.
Hated the most: The online multiplayer component is completely mishandled and underwhelming.

As some of you may know, Perfect Dark has long held the honor of being my all-time favorite game. Lately I’ve been leaning more towards BioShock for that title, but the adventures of Joanna Dark are still high on my list. And while I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reliving them with the Xbox Live Arcade remake, seeing how poorly this game has aged in comparison to Halo: Combat Evolved, which came out just one year after Perfect Dark, has rubbed some of the nostalgia away. Rare’s spiritual successor to GoldenEye may have been a revolutionary classic in 2000, and in some respects it still is today, but the overall experience is bogged down by dated design methods.

The most noticeable aspect of the Perfect Dark remake is unquestionably the high-definition visuals. You most certainly won’t be confusing these visuals for those of a modern AAA title, but brighter colors, improved textures, a rock solid frame-rate, and strong art direction make the difference mostly negligible when you’re in the heat of combat. Some positively fantastic character animations (well, for the time at least) and attention to detail like blood-splatter on the walls also help to make this game easy on the eyes. Of course, the character models themselves can look a little blocky at times, and hearing a character talk (the voice acting’s terrific, by the way) without moving her mouth reminds us just how old this game really is. But for the most part, this XBLA remake looks DRASTICALLY better than the original and manages to compete in today’s downloadable market.

Lucky for us, music is something that tends to withstand the march of time quite well, and Perfect Dark‘s audio is no exception. The thumping electronic beats that set the tone of every level are some of the most memorable I’ve ever heard. The instant my ears intercepted the iconic typing of a keyboard and subsequent menu score upon booting the game up, I had a nice little rush of nostalgia that made me feel all warm inside. Pretty much every single track the game offers is superbly fitting. Throw in distinctive pops and clacks for each of the 45+ weapons in the game (oh, and that’s not even including the secondary fire most of them have) and you have a recipe for auditory arousal.

Unfortunately, where Perfect Dark shows most of its age is in the gameplay arena. Levels essentially boil down to corridor-crawls populated by enemies that make Duke Nukem look like a rocket scientist. It is actually scary to think of how dumb the AI in this game is. Then again, it is a whole lot of fun to run through a level, two pistols in hand, slow-mo cheat activated (remember when games used to reward you with cheats for completing challenging tasks?), pretending you’re in a John Woo movie. But when you remember you’re playing a video game, you’ll likely be shocked at the stupidity of your enemies if you’ve played a shooter in the past ten years. And while I’m on the topic of John Woo movies, Perfect Dark is surprisingly void of compelling set-pieces. The core gameplay’s fun, but it’s difficult to pick out specific segments of awesomeness.

So you might be thinking that this game is frustratingly easy because of the mookish nature of your foes. On the contrary! One of the things that Halo did extremely well was to provide a clear sense of direction and purpose in sprawling, open levels. Objectives were always clear and if you ever got lost the game guided you towards your goal. Perfect Dark takes the exact opposite approach. Even though the levels exemplify the restricted hallways of yesteryear (at least they look great and varied while doing so), it is far too easy to not know what to do or where to go. The objectives always sound cool in the context of the story, but that doesn’t mean much when it’s not abundantly clear what the task is. It’s not uncommon to spend 15 minutes searching for your goal while shouting to yourself, “Why isn’t there a God damn hint system!?!” It’s really a shame that poor level design kills the pace of what are supposed to be fast-paced missions. In all honesty, Perfect Dark takes less than 3 hours to beat once you know what you’re looking for.

Another old-school element that might turn modern gamers off is the trial and error nature of the missions. Sure, the enemies may as well be hippies chaining themselves to trees while you chomp on a cigar and pull the lever on a bulldozer, but screw one objective up and you’re forced to restart the entire mission. Personally, I didn’t mind this all that much considering how brief the missions are once you’ve figured them out, and some people might even relish the traditional challenge, but I know this sort of design will bother a lot of modern gamers.

One thing that I really did appreciate about the mission-structure is how objectives change based on difficulty level. While most games just crank up the damage enemies do and can take, Perfect Dark actually adds more and tougher tasks to complete. A lot of times, certain sections of a level can be totally skipped on Agent but are required visits on Perfect Agent. It’s a really unique thing that I haven’t really seen in other games. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing it, though.

And believe it or not, the subconscious desire to murder everything that moves actually isn’t the only reason a player has to progress through the campaign. The quirky characters of this game’s fiction drive a campy, sci-fi spy-thriller story that’s fun and entertaining throughout. I mean, seriously, it’s got an alien named Elvis who complains about his space-ship having no style! I think the fact that Joanna Dark was one of the first strong female leads in gaming is also worth noting. She still has more personality than a lot of male leads today.

But let’s be honest here–nobody remembers Perfect Dark for its campaign. They remember it for the co-op, the counter-op (like co-oping the campaign, but instead of working together, one player takes on the role of continuously spawning enemies and tries to halt the other player), and the ridiculously in-depth and customizable multiplayer. And because we’ve all been good boys and girls, all of that returns unchanged.

Well, I suppose two important things have changed. The first is a personal issue I have with the game that most of you probably won’t notice, but in my mind, Rare’s multiplayer was always designed around “dancing.” The way the controls were mapped, with forward/backward movement on the joystick and strafing on the C buttons encouraged a sort of diagonal movement for speed purposes and circling, dance-like firefights. As faithfully as the controls have been remapped to the Xbox 360 controller, that is one thing 4J Studios got wrong. The remake opts for the modern preference of forward/backward and strafing being on the left joystick together, with head movement on the right stick. Usually I’d prefer this, but with Perfect Dark, my natural instinct was to go back to the way I played when I was ten years old. And I truly do believe that it upsets the flow of competitive matches…but maybe that’s just me.

The other, more important change, is that all that multiplayer mayhem can now be shared online with up to seven other players. But there’s two major problems with this. Firstly, every single match, no matter how big or small, regardless of your internet speed, will be interrupted by frequent lag. I don’t want to say it’s game-breaking, but it is so prominent that it’ll cost you at least two or three kills a game.

The second reason is actually the side-effect of one of the game’s biggest draws–its massive customization. See, when you’re playing four player split-screen with your mates (I almost scored this as “Great” for that reason alone, Call of Duty and every other non-Halo shooter available today!), then six game modes, 16 maps (at least that’s what I’ve unlocked so far), 17 weapon sets containing over 45 different tools of destruction (I will admit that not all of them are completely unique and that the selection probably could have been trimmed down without affecting gameplay), up to eight bots with 17 selectable personalities, and so on…well, all of those options are just the mother’s milk with your friends. You can create special matches that only your sick minds would like, like King of the Hill with slow-mo turned on and a custom weapon set of N-Bombs and Tranquilizers only. And you can all dress up like scientists and pretend you’re doing very important work too!

When we apply this to the online world–well, I’d hate to think of the results. But, that’s what developers are for. It’s their job to create game modes with enough structure and rules for us to have fun. 4J Studios decided it’d be easier to just make things as dumbed down as possible with randomized weapon sets and levels for every game. Basic death-match is the most typical game mode. Every online douche picks Elvis out of the dozens of character models which stops being funny when you realize that everybody is too short to easily shoot at. I would have much rather had a server list full of custom games to choose from, even if it meant a couple minutes of searching for a game. As it is, the match-making system already takes a while to start games, and it usually starts them before the lobby is full. Bots aren’t allowed in public matches either. It’s all terribly mishandled.

And when you actually get into a competitive game, it’s just heart-breaking to see how unbalanced the weapons are. Every game is simply a race to the most powerful weapon and there is absolutely no counter to power-weapons. There’s nothing stopping a player from easily stocking up on 50 rounds of grenade-launcher ammo while everybody else spawns unarmed like frightened bunnies. The balance issues are something that I never really noticed when I used to play this game, but after a decade of shooter refinement, the simplicity of the core combat stands out like a grotesquely sore thumb.

Still, when you consider the arcadey design of the campaign which lends itself to a lot of replayability, throw in all of the multiplayer depth, and put a $10 price tag on it, then you really can’t go wrong with Perfect Dark. If you happen to have a couple friends to play with then I guarantee you’ll have a blast helping each other out through the 29 increasingly difficult multiplayer challenges (which, unfortunately, are not offered in public online matches), co-op and counter-op modes, and whatever insane custom game-types you can dream up for three friends and eight bots.

Ultimately, this Xbox Live Arcade remake of Perfect Dark does what it set out to do quite well. The original game is faithfully adapted with much improved visuals and a flawed online multiplayer component. It still retains all of its old design methods which will likely have you wondering how we ever played shooters without the ability to adequately zoom in and aim a gun, but it’ll have you grinning with nostalgia at the same time. For the price of this classic game you really can’t go wrong. Just don’t be surprised if you’re left longing for a proper Perfect Dark sequel that takes all of the innovative ideas of the original and applies them with some more modern design techniques.

Author: Cody

Tags: 4j studios, microsoft, perfect dark, rare, review, xbla