May not be worth $59.99 but it's sure as hell worth $29.99.
One of the most important aspects of an FPS is how the guns feel. In this case, the guns feel fantastic. Every time you find yourself emptying clip after clip of rounds in a heated firefight, it just feels great. Every enemy you shoot at reacts to wherever you hit them, the sound and feel of each gun is unique and satisfying, but even though the guns are fun to shoot with, firefights seem just a tad lifeless because of how the enemies strategize against you. There isn't really any "strategy" to it, actually, it's more like just the way they shoot you and shoot you and shoot you without thinking at all about their own safety. There's no realism at all, I realized this more than ever when I let my 6-year-old nephew play and he was having trouble aiming at the enemies with the crosshairs, yet the enemies were just standing there waiting to be targetted. This kind of thing takes away from the urgency and immersion of the game. Not only that but each mission has very little variety to it, it's just the standard running from point A to point B while shooting at whoever gets in your way and maybe protecting one or two people from being killed. The game makes up for this by staging some pretty intense firefights that are actually exceptionally cool and make the game seem more frantic than the average console FPS.
The single player campaign definitely needs improvement, but the area I think needs the most improvement is the storyline. Each mission has a cut-scene at the beginning and a cut-scene at the end, sometimes one in the middle too. Very few of these cut-scenes make any clear sense of what's going on though. A couple of missions you'll be in an urban environment, then you'll suddenly be on a station in the middle of the ocean, then a snowy Asian mountain range, a Peruvian jungle, and finally a sandy middle-eastern desert. None of it has any logical connection to each other and it all just feels random.
The most robust part of the gameplay in the game is its online. Perfect Dark Zero's online modes have a lot of variety, options and customization in them that make the online features in the game long-lasting and fun. Deathmatch offers the basic run-and-gun shoot-em-up gameplay that can be expected from any FPS, and it remains fun here with modes like capture the flag, killcount and team killcount. There is also a second mode of multiplayer mode called DarkOps which offers team-based strategic multiplayer for serious players. Online mode is quick and easy to use over Xbox Live and a good connection and the majority of the time you spend with this game will be in the online mode.
One impressive thing about Perfect Dark Zero is the visuals. This game is very pretty and was one of the best looking titles on the system when it launched. A year later though, if you've already seen and played games like Gears of War you will be just a bit underwhelmed. The graphics in this game have a very bright, colorful, almost cartoonish feel to them. Every gun in the game looks amazing, the animations are great and the explosions look awesome. Everything is very shiny, as if everything in the game was coated with several gallons of nail polish and as strange as it looks it's still very attractive. Part of the great feeling you get shooting the weapons comes from how awesome it looks when you're shooting things. When you shoot these guns, they don't look or feel like you're shooting BB guns, they really do look extremely powerful and deadly. Still, there are some things that need tweaking, like the fact that the enemies look like they're running in slow-motion and it looks very strange. Also, sometimes you'll probably see some screw-ups in the physics, like a downed soldier suddenly flying all over the place like it's being punched around by some huge invisible monster. In the end though, it all looks very good.
In the sound department, there isn't much to complain about. The voice acting is pretty good for the most part, the guns sound as powerful as they look and the music is catchy and varied. The only problems come from the multiplayer deathmatch which has an annoying announcer guy who has to say everything that's happening in the match out loud. "Flag taken!" "Flag dropped!" "Flag returned!" "Territory contested!" "Territory lost!" It gets pretty annoying pretty fast, but not so much that you stop playing, the wrost it will do is make you turn down the volume on your TV.
There's a lot to do in Perfect Dark Zero too. With loads of great options in online, a co-op mode and a single player campaign with 13 missions on three difficulties, with an unlockable fourth difficulty, there are hours and hours worth of things to do in this game. For a launch game, it's pretty packed with content, not to mention there are plenty of achievements to unlock over Xbox Live as well. At the price it's at now, you'll definitely be getting your money's worth.
With all of the hype that this game had, it really didn't "live up to" anything. It didn't live up to the impressive innovation of the first Perfect Dark. It also didn't live up to being the killer app that Halo was. Still, as its own game Perfect Dark Zero doesn't do anything terribly wrong. It has great gameplay, great graphics, great sound and great value. With that in mind, despite the game's flaws, it's a worthy purchase for fans of console FPS games and gamers who want something to do over Xbox Live besides Gears of War.