Unfinished, shallow, awful, lazy, rushed, sloppy, ugly. And no, I'm not trying to name the seven dwarfs.
Originally released for the Nintendo 64, Perfect Dark was considered the spiritual successor to the famously brilliant Goldeneye 64. At the time people had settled into the idea that all games in the first person shooter genre were Doom, or something like Doom. Then along came Goldeneye, with smarter enemies, a variety of slick gadgets and weapons, and so many new ideas that it helped reshape the genre to this very day. Naturally, once we'd found and defeated Alec Trevelyan, played the multiplayer until we knew ever corner of every stage better than new knew the back of our hand, we wanted more. Rare couldn't give us Bond, they'd lost the rights, so rather than a slick 007 we were promised a new hero in the form of femme fatale Joanna Dark.
Perfect Dark, after all it's long delays did what many weren't sure could be done, it utterly blew away the classic Goldeneye on every single level. The AI was smarter, the moves and weapons were better and slicker, the stages were more challenging and at times brilliantly created. This was, for many, the best shooter ever made, and for you kids out there spoiled on dual analogue or mouse and keyboard, being able to play a game like this as well as we could with just one stick was a feat unto itself. Rare had a hit, and better still this hit was all theirs, so a sequel was going to happen, it had to happen, Agent Dark was just too perfect to let go.
Then this happened:
http://www.gamespot.com/users/Icehearted/view_image_original?id=O4IMtBom7hmU5BHknA&popup=1
And it was downhill from there...
Aside from looking like something Disney threw up, this prequel to the stellar Perfect Dark was an exercise in what not to do when making a game, as a matter of fact it did everything wrong.
The story was absolutely garbage, the gadgets were underwhelming (including the oh-so-cleverly named "loctopus"), the weapons were pretty mediocre or at times even bad, which wasn't exactly helped by the horrendous controls, even aiming with the analogue stick was tricky. The graphics epitomize generic, the characters, most especially Agent Dark (A.K.A Ginger Spice) were brutally ugly, the voice acting was terrible, unless you like a grating Jamaican voice telling you what to do at every opportunity like a mentally handicapped parrot. The stages were either boring or annoying, and playing the game from a camera angle positioned exactly one foot in front of the main characters chest only added to the aggravation of what I consider one of the most frustrating shooters I'd ever played.
Rare, the game's developers, eventually admitted that the game was an unfinished rushed mess, which is painfully obvious to anyone other than it seems professional reviewers, but I can understand how something like this got pushed out the way it had. At the time the Xbox 360 had next to nothing going for it, people were crying their hearts out for Halo 3, and the overrated Gears of War was still only being talked about. Considering the amount of time spent developing and hyping the game, they should have done more; more testing, more tweaking, more polish, more effort. What we got instead was a shameful mess that rates, according to Gamespot reviewers, just as high as Gears of War 2, Modern Warfare 1 and 2, and even manages to outscore Borderlands by half a point! I defy anyone to tell me that Perfect Dark Zero, a game I remind you was called rushed and incomplete by even it's developers, is as good as or better than the aforementioned games.
I hate this game, and I just don't see how the damage they've done by making a slick female spy into hipster trash can be undone. Either way, I'm truly sorry I'd ever played this game.