Was it worth the wait and all the hype? That would be a "No."
I have never been that big a fan of Rare's games. Sure I loved Goldeneye & Perfect Dark as much as anyone, but none of their other games were really all that good. I have always felt that they have become severely overrated (like Rockstar) because they made one GREAT game, lost the Bond license, made a second great game (PD), and have been riding the coattails of that since. And like Blizzard, Rare tends to delay their games for what seems like an eternity. The thing is that when Blizzard actually releases their games, they are the best on the market. If you look at Microsoft's purchase of Rare and all the hype around it, I feel that they haven't really gotten a lot for their bucks. Two average Xbox games and two decent 360 launch titles aren't what gamers had in mind when it came to Rare's future.
And now we are left with a game that can have you screaming at your TV in frustration one minute, then having a great time the next. That is the problem with this game. It's really only fun online and while it looks 'next-gen', it certainly doesn't show off what the 360 can do. For every good thing, there are two bad things that I can say about this game.
Pros: Best weapons I have ever seen in a console FPS; the enviroments look fantastic; pretty good music; great presentation; nice addittion with the CO-OP feature; online multiplayer is the only reason to own this game; excellent selection of different match types for Xbox Live; online games can hold up to 32 players; it's very addicting to play online and go for all the achievements; Enemy AI is pretty good when set on settings higher than 'Agent'.
Cons: Non-interesting storyline; one-player game is crap; another game that suffers from a lack of SAVE CHECKPOINTS (my biggest pet peeve in gaming); lack of an in-game map; very vague mission objectives; the character models are all goofy (Joanna Dark looks like a Britney Spears wanna-be with red hair) & look current-gen; terrible voice acting; comes off as a wanna-be Bond FPS and isn't much better than the Bond FPS available for the current-gen; most of the weapons need bigger clips, as you spend half the game reloading; 'DarkOps' online game mode comes off as a bad Counterstrike clone for a number of reasons; single-player difficulty is very unbalanced.
So as you can see, the only reason to purchase this game is to play it on Xbox Live. The single player game is extremely frustrating because of the lack of checkpoints and isn't all that interesting to begin with. Online play is a blast and can get VERY addicting trying to get all those achievements. PDZ isn't a bad game. It's just a game that doesn't come close to living up to all of the hype that surrounded it, and is really only fun online shooting other people. It's too bad the single-player game can't live up to expectations, because this was obviously not designed to be a Counterstrike or Battlefield wanna-be. Unfortunately, that's what it essentially boils down to. Because if it wasn't for the online aspect, this game would get a 7 in my rankings. So if you don't use Xbox Live, then take that into account.