its great game
You'll begin, unless you want your arse handed to you by an online ninja, with the 14-level single-player adventure. To anyone skilled in counting, it should come as no surprise this is a prequel, but there's absolutely no need to scour charity shop bargain bins for game cartridges; previous knowledge of the N64 classic is unnecessary. You're Joanna, a wet-behind-the-ears special operative with a Yankie accent (bizarrely, she spoke with a plum in her mouth in Perfect Dark). Your father is Jack Dark, a mercenary with vocal chords that have gargled glass. Your chum back at mission control is Chandra, a dreadlocked hottie with a viper wit and a body that old men go to prison for leering at.
Through a somewhat convoluted plot that you won't be spending too much time remembering, this motley crew begin to track a Mekon-headed old Chinese man called Zhang-Li, and his supremely-hot-but-bound-to-be-scarred-later-on daughter, Mai Hem ('mayhem', geddit?). This is achieved by killing hundreds of thugs, most with comical oriental accents. Good, wholesome fun is guaranteed. This is the game at its least impressive; the voices range from passable to offensive, later on enemies sound dangerously close to South Park's Terrance and Phillip, and the slightly 'wacky' nature of the enemies fails to amuse, especially when almost everything else in the game is so polished.
The gigantic level structure of PDZ simply could not be recreated on a last-generation console. By the time you've struggled out of a lift, and gawked at the flippin' great rocket on a launch pad, battled across a floating ocean platform, ridden a gantry bay, been attacked by bad bastards in jetpacks, and realised this is still the first mission, you'll be praising Microsoft's Rare purchase as a stroke of prescient genius. And the level design never deviates from 'impressive', except towards the realm of 'astonishing'.
Aside from a return to this floating fortress later on, each of the missions is significantly different from the next. You'll spend some time blowing up a boat in a rundown warehouse, then scale a phenomenally lit nightclub, realising the epilepsy warning in the instruction booklet wasn't a hollow threat. The action moves on to a dash along the tops of skyscrapers, tagging foes and keeping on your toes as a manic boss named Killian sweeps down in a dropship brimming with rockets, and two large, minimally protected engines.
A night-time assault on a Chinese temple during a fireworks celebration is a particularly choice bit of fun with a gun. The infiltration and escape from a laboratory and a hovercraft ride through enemy compounds is classic heart-pounding action; pant-crappingly intense. But it is the jungle trek through a native village and a jetpack ride over Mayan ruins that left us pointing at the screen, agape. The action never lets up - it simply goes from one epic locale to the next. It's the assault on a massive temple exterior, followed by a banzai charge over a huge bridge swarming with wave after wave of enemies that really leaves you bewildered and utterly ecstatic at what's possible in games nowadays.
The advancements in level design also leave you little concern over that dreaded (and invented) word: 'replayability'. Because, like the N64 sequel, Rare has ensured you'll be charging through each mission dozens of times. Why? Well, for starters, there are four difficulty settings: Agent for the absolute beginner; Secret Agent for the casual or inebriated gamer; Perfect Agent for veteran first-person aficionados; and finally, Dark Agent, a mode so horrifically hard you'll be shouting all manner of rude words at your television screen.
The way you complete each mission also adds to the replay value: the easier the difficulty, the fewer objectives you'll have to attempt. And in almost every single room, there's a different way to play. Go in guns blazing, or snipe from a balcony? Or use the Cover mode to hide behind a wall, using your target reticule to line up a kill? Or you can always find a second player (either online or System Link) to partner up with, and waltz through each level yelling radio messages at each other, catching foes in the crossfire, and solving puzzles that only appear if there are two agents on the case. This is, quite simply, the best co-op action since Doom 3. Bloody hell, is that not enough for you? Then how about collecting the new weapons each mission has, then using them on previously unlocked levels, thus creating a whole set of new opportunities for wanton destruction?
Ah yes, the weapons. All 25 of them. And most of them have two or three modes of fire; some can be dual-wielded, and almost all of them have a novel and potentially devastating tactic you'll spend weeks perfecting. There are just so many ways to pummel, eviscerate, skewer, or cleave your foe that you'll go giddy figuring out which is your favourite. Each weapon, thanks to months of finetuning at Rare, is reasonably balanced to all the others, but it still didn't stop us over-using our homage to GoldenEye, the FAC-16 assault rifle. Dropping foes with a grenade burst or bullets has never been so much fun. Well, except when you try the RCP-90 with its threat detector, effectively turning everyone orange and allowing you to see in the dark. Double-magnums you can fire independently or at the same time? Machine-guns that turn into sentry guns to stick to exits and catch adversaries out? Rifles with a special visual scope turning the entire playing field into Arnie's X-Ray scanning scene from Total Recall? Some of the OXM team had to be slapped to stop them squealing. And we don't even have the room to tell you about Joanna's gadgets; three types of goggles, a demokit for blasting through weakened walls, a Locktopus for opening gates and dropping ladders, and a DataThief for hacking terminals.
Then there's online play for up to 32 players. Our initial disappointment (only six levels?) was well and truly crushed under the insane number of options to try. A Counter-Strike-based method of armament purchasing drew us in; two vehicles with which to trundle over enemies brought home great memories of Unreal Tournament 2004; masses of game modes fed our insane hunger for Xbox Live carnage. The destructible nature of each zone brought home the teamplay and tactics needed to succeed. We then started hyperventilating at the countless tactics you can employ with any of the weapons, the custom armament selection you can tweak in the options, and the fact you can shrink or enlarge any map from tiny to gigantic.
And don't get us started on the Gamerscore points you can accrue. We had to have a lie-down after that. We really weren't prepared for how good this game is. PDZ is easily the most graphically gorgeous first-person game ever seen on a console. But it's the exceptional replay value both offline and on, the multitude of weapons you'll entertain yourself with for weeks, and the balls-to-the-wall, last-second way this game came together without imploding that makes you glad to be a gamer.