James Bond steps down from the stage and is replaced by Agent Dark. Can Rare top it's own masterpiece?
Story-wise, Perfect Dark starts out small and spreads out making a mess. You play as Joanna Dark, a secret agent in the future for the Carington Institute. The game opens with her sneaking into a DataDyne building, a rival to Carington Institute, to find a Dr. Carol, believing him to posses knowledge the DataDyne can't get their hands on. After the rescue things go from bad to worse and strange characters are introduced, such as the mysterious Mr. Blonde. It just ends up confusing and messy, plot points just fly out of nowhere and twists aren't that well-thought out. Seeing that you need the expansion pak to experience this story mostly shows that story wasn't a focus, so the blow is softened but it's still sorta hurts.
Gameplay was where Goldeneye 007 shined, bringing functional, 3D, competitive FPS gameplay to home consoles,and Perfect Dark effectively outshines it. Gameplay largely remains the same with some minor differences; all weapons have alternate firing modes, not all weapons can be dual-wielded, weapons are futuristic and creative and the AI enemies react differently. The game controls the same and relies on the lock-on and it still holds up well. The levels are huge and the higher the difficulty the more objectives there are to complete. Unlike Goldeneye, most of the levels have story sequences where you speak to another character which makes it feel more like a story but the real appeal is to see how fast and accurately you can complete the levels to unlock cheats, similarly to Goldeneye.
The story mode can be played in co-op with another player or an AI partner which really requires the expansion pak. There also exists a mode called counter-operative which has the second player playing as an enemy soldier trying to kill the first player. This mode is interesting but can be abused, the second player can kill themselves and they always respawn as another enemy and they can kill the other enemies with friendly fire allowing a single player with two controllers to just abuse the game which can be fun in it's own right.
The biggest mode is the Combat Simulator aka multiplayer. It has plenty of game modes, ranging from deathmatch to capture the flag, with a huge amount of customization options. Never before has there been such a huge, deep multiplayer mode. Even better, it can be played alone, there are challenges and bots allowing for customizable single player arenas. All the weapons from the single player can be used in multiplayer and you can choose which weapons are on the map. Want to go all throwing knives? Go ahead. All rocket launchers? Sure. All tranquilizers? That's a mess of a match. The gameplay in Perfect Dark is set to age well.
The audio in Perfect Dark is partially mixed but mostly exceptional. The soundtrack is RARE quality amazing and plenty of the characters are voiced well, but there are some lame sounding characters and a lot sound similar; Trent sounds an awful lot like the President...The grunt sounds are great, so great it's hard to imagine the game without them and the guns sound extremely powerful. This game is up to RARE's audio standards.
The visual front of the game pushes the Nintendo 64 to it's limits, no question about that. There are plenty of times where the framerate dips due to the chaos on screen and that's using the expansion pak. It's safe to say that this game has the most content in any N64 game, so much content that it's amazing it fits on the cartridge. The levels are huge, good-looking (albeit somewhat empty), the guns look amazing and the characters are well modeled though they lack facial movement. The guns even have reload animations and there are quite a few different faces for the enemies. Combine everything and the ability to have 4 human players playing at once with multiple bots with very little performance dips and no game on the N64 can hope to surpass this game in this area. Simply RARE's crown achievement on the N64.
Overall, Perfect Dark is one of the best games to be released during the Nintendo 64's lifetime. It might be the best of the generation. This game has so much content despite it's short single-player. It's a game worth every penny. Step up and enter the perfect dark.
PROS:
- amazing gunplay with more than a handful of weapons
- fantastic graphics
- plenty of modes
- lots of things to do
- fantastic music and decent voice work
- multiplayer worthy of an award
- tons of options
- goofy story
CONS:
- controls take time to master
- framerate dips often during the larger levels
- requires an expansion pak for the majority of the content
- short campaign
- goofy story
Story: 7.0/10
Gameplay: 10/10
Audio: 9.0/10
Presentation: 10/10