When the original Xbox launched in 2001, it hit the ground running with what was inarguably the single biggest reason to own the console from day one - Halo. Bungie's seminal shooter went a long way towards putting Xbox units into gamers' homes, not only in that first holiday season, but also in the months and years to follow. In an ideal world, I'm sure Microsoft would have loved to have sent Master Chief along with each and every Xbox 360, to provide that same burst of excitement that he sparked back in 2001. But having only released Halo 2 last year, the logistics behind getting Halo 3 out the door were a relative impossibility. Still, Microsoft has more than one big property in their hands. And in lieu of Master Chief and Halo it became obvious that Perfect Dark Zero was going to assume the position of blockbuster shooter for the 360 launch. Starring the saucy Joanna Dark, the Perfect Dark series itself sports a rather impressive pedigree - it's forerunner on the Nintendo 64 being one of the smash hits of its time, and one of the best multiplayer console games of all time. While failing to reach the heights of Halo's 2001 debut, Perfect Dark Zero is a stunning display of the power, intuitiveness, and all-inclusiveness of the 360 platform - and with its engrossing multiplayer, will likely be to Xbox Live what Halo was to Xbox LANs so many years ago.

Perfect Dark Zero, as the name implies, is actually a prequel to the N64 classic. Though familiarity with the series isn't a necessity, fans of the original will likely get a bigger kick out the story. You star as the eccentric red-haired beauty Joanna Dark, who is going through the ropes to become a team member in her father's bounty hunting business. The plot thickens from there, almost predictably. The story is fairly linear in focus, not unlike a big action movie, though the terrain you traverse includes everything from city streets to jungles to industrial complexes. The story, clocking in at around 12-15 hours, never really rises above the level of popcorn action flick, and there are some truly bizarre twists (especially near the end), but it still serves its purpose as a conduit for explosive action.

Oh, and what explosive action it is. The mission types you'll encounter run the gamut from straightforward run and gunfests, to stealth missions, to escort jobs. There's even a little vehicular combat thrown in for good measure. The gunplay is, for the most part, pretty standard fare. What makes PDZ a little different is the ability to take cover behind walls or objects and fire shots while in relative safety. If your enemy is too up close and personal to take out from cover, you can execute a rolling maneuver, which makes you duck out of your enemy's reticule, if momentarily, and gives you the opportunity to reload. If you're feeling particularly brazen, you can actually rush enemies and snatch their guns out of their hands - but that's not recommended for the feint of heart.

PDZ also sports a health system reminiscent of Halo, which is more forgiving on those on who prefer run and gun tactics. Your health meter goes down predictably as you take fire, but as long as you find cover before you're cut down, you'll regen a considerable amount of health. You can't go crazy about it; because you're max health will slowly wear down as you take damage, but it's nice that the health system is so tactile and forgiving, because the mission objectives certainly aren't. Breaking the mold of most shooters nowadays, PDZ doesn't allow the player to save at will. In fact, your progress is only saved at designated checkpoints, of which there is a scant few in each level. This can be something of a nightmare on the higher difficulty settings, as there are some support objectives and big firefights that one probably only wants to have to deal with once. Still, it's nice to see a developer stick to their guns and not go easy on the player for once. If you're really stuck, there's always the option to turn down the difficulty to Agent, and use the waypoints to guide yourself around the level. It's not recommended, as it takes away much of the intensity of the experience, but it's nice to know that it's there.

The arsenal at your fingertips on PDZ is impressive, running the gamut from simple pistols to sub-machine guns to high-tech plasma rifles. What distinguishes the weapons in PDZ from those in other shooters is that each and every weapon has a distinct and situationally useful secondary, and sometimes even tertiary, function. These secondary functions can be as mundane as the equipping of a silencer as on the PSP pistol, or as bizarre as the Laptop Gun's ability to transform into a sentry turret. Each and every gun has it's own distinct balance of accuracy, damage, and secondary function utility, making familiarity with the weaponry an absolute necessity. You only have four weapon slots to use, so you have to choose your poison carefully. You can carry as many as four pistols that's your bag, but the bigger more powerful guns take two or three slots.

While you'll become familiar with the tools of your trade in single player, it's in PDZ's Combat Arena that you'll truly gain an appreciation for the attention to balance and detail that Rare put into the game. The multiplayer modes aren't exactly pioneering - you've seen most of what they have to offer already. But with PDZ's excellent combat system, original arsenal of weapons, and seamless Xbox Live support, it feels like your first deathmatch all over again. The multiplayer modes are split up into the deathmatch and dark-ops categories. The deathmatch bracket features many of the mainstays of multiplayer shooter mayhem that we've grown accustomed to over the years. You've got killcount, team killcount, capture the flag, and territorial gains. You can customize your matches by adding bots of varying degrees of difficulty, customizing the weapons cache, and even selecting the size and specific parts of the game's six maps that you want to play. Deathmatch is fun if you can't muster up enough people for dark-ops and feel like wasting some bots, but it doesn't hold a candle to the dark-ops mode.

Featuring the onslaught, eradication, infection, and sabotage modes, Dark-ops is vaguely reminiscent of Counterstrike in that you have a set number of credits that you use to purchase weapons between rounds You score extra credits for completing objectives and credits are taken away for no-no's like teamkilling. In onslaught, a team of attackers is tasked with taking down a fortified defensive position, manned by the team of armed defenders. The attackers don't get much in the ways of weapons, but they can keep spawning, where the defenders have to make due with a single life. Infection is somewhat similar in that a small number of players are "infected" and can recruit other people to the side of the undead by killing them. The living have their pick of weapons, but it eventually becomes a numbers game as more and more people keep dying. You can win the game simply by surviving the round. It all sounds simple, but words simply don't do justice to the complete package offered in the multiplayer - particularly the dark-ops mode. Until you've hunkered down behind a wall of sentry turrets and mines, frantically gunning down waves of undead players, struggling to survive those last few seconds of the round by rolling and firing from cover, your bullets make pock-marks on the wall as your teammates yell into their microphones… you simply have no way of knowing how much fun it is.

And perhaps a large part of the fun of the game lies in the presentation, which is where the game is most visibly next-generation. The maps, even in multiplayer, are spectacularly done, with all sorts of neat textures, dynamic lighting, and nuanced attention to detail. The character models are hardly photo-realistic, and have a cartoony style about them vaguely reminiscent of Timesplitters. Still, they fit the light-hearted action element of the game extremely well. It should be noted of course that the game is about twice as beautiful when viewed on an HD monitor. The majority of the gameplay that went towards this review was on an old RCA 27" CRT, so don't worry if you don't have the hardware. The only time they game even really saw a hiccup was in a 16-player rockets-only deathmatch in a small map. The framerate dipped noticeably under the force of 16+ simultaneous, beautifully rendered explosions, but that's to be expected.

In similar fashion, PDZ will blow your pants off on a tricked out 5.1 surround sound system, but it still comes through forcefully using the default TV speakers. The weapons each have their own distinct sound to them, and they radiate really well off your surroundings to create a neat ambience in fast-moving firefights. It's rather remarkable how situationally aware you can be in the multiplayer, even in the larger levels. Of course, while the sound effects are top-notch, the voice acting is… less than optimal. It's one thing to include campy voice acting to go with a campy story to go with an over-the-top action game. It's another thing entirely to completely botch the voices to the point where they are a pain to listen to. If the story weren't already a passing concern, this really might have been more of a problem, but you really only have to listen to it on your first blow through single player, then you can peacefully ignore it for as long as you play the game.

For a launch title, Perfect Dark Zero presents a persuasively complete package. The single-player campaign is a thoroughly enjoyable romp that can and should be enjoyed several times though, especially if you've got a buddy willing to hook up with for some co-op. Yet the core gameplay dynamics really show their luster most ably under heavy fire in the dark-ops modes on Xbox Live, where players will find rich gameplay that will likely last for months. I really can't think of a more fitting opener for the Xbox 360 platform than Perfect Dark. It combines all the elements that distinguish the console on the market today (stunning HD-presentation coupled with thoroughly engaging multiplayer over Xbox Live) into a tight package. While it may still be a notch below the illustrious Halo in terms its mass-market reach, it's a formidable launch title that should be in every 360 owner's library.

Score: 90%

Nov 27, 2005 | 0 comments
Chris Chester