Perfect Dark Zero: Review

Perfect Dark: Zero was released as a launch title to the Xbox 360 with some very heavy hype and high expectations. Many were hoping that PDZ would be an adequate substitute for Halo 3, Microsoft was hoping for both a new blockbuster shooter franchise and for a title that would make 360s fly off of shelves. You know, considering the shortage of the consoles didn't do that to begin with. Whereas PDZ is a very enjoyable shooter with some excellent features and good solid gameplay, it does have its shortcomings and pitfalls.

There are a number of things that PDZ has going for it, such as the numerous weapon functions that are sported. Every gun in the game has a secondary function (note: not necessarily a secondary fire mode) and there are a few that even have a tertiary function (which is pretty much limited to silencers, flashlights, etc). This attention to detail is a very nice feature that Rare has included that ads a good degree of depth to the game through functionality. Only real shortcoming with this is that the flashlight is rather useless, as all areas of the game are lit well enough that a flashlight isn't needed. This is true at least on standard definition TVs, however it may be different on HDTVs, since games such as Need for Speed: Most Wanted are noticably darker on an HDTV. Another really big feature that I think is simply excellent is the weapons and inventory system, taking cues from Counter-Strike and Deus Ex. Your character, Joanna Dark, has 4 blocks that are designated for weapons and 4 blocks for inventory items. The way you load Jo up with weaponry depends on what you can fit into these blocks, for example, pistols and handheld items such as grenades, flashbangs and a weapon known as the Hawk Boomerang (a circular blade thrown from a special glove that will bounce off walls and penetrate any enemy in its path until it returns to the glove), while weapons like the automatic rifles, shotgun, superdragon, etc all take up 2 blocks and finally the heavy weaponry such as sniper rifles, rocket launcher and M60 all take up 3 blocks each. This brings a very good means of balance to the weapons that isn't present in many other shooters. For instance, in games such as Unreal Tournament and Quake your character can hold as many guns as he comes across and can stockpile ammo for each.

In games such as Halo your character can only hold 2 weapons, but they can be a combination of any 2 weapons, leaving someone able to carry the sniper rifle and the rocket launcher and still be able to throw grenades. What this bin system creates is a situation where you can't just select the most powerful weapons in the game, but instead have to weigh the facts such as what map you're going to be playing in, what you can expect in a certain level, etc when planning your layout. You're able to grab the rocket launcher and a pistol, however if you're going to be playing a level that has a lot of snipers in it with a good deal of armor you're going to be more or less screwed. This keeps people from having too much of an unfair advantage, as you can't take the rocket launcher for close-quarters quick kills and a sniper rifle for all distance kills as you could in Halo. You can still use 2 automatic weapons, which are decently powerful, but you need to keep in mind that each weapon is contained within a category like 'Pistols,' 'Handhelds,' 'SMG,' 'Assault,' 'Close Combat' and 'Heavy' and if you select 2 weapons from the same category (with the exceptions of 'Heavy' and 'Handheld') they will both use the same ammunition supply and you could be left with no weapons very quickly.

Perfect Dark: Zero sports a feature that doesn't appear much in first person shooter titles: a cover system. When Jo approaches a wall, a visual cue shows that she is able to take cover against that wall and the camera will shift to a third person view, allowing you to peer around corners, over the top of a short wall, etc. This allows you to be able to see any advancing enemies, security cameras, etc, and be able to step out from cover and begin shooting while still in third person view. This makes the game a great deal easier than it'd be otherwise, especially since, for the most part, you don't have the risk of bodily harm while in cover to see how enemies are advancing on your position and see how security cameras are moving about. After playing PDZ for a fair amount of time, you'll very well be attempting to take cover in any other FPS game.

Another feature that PDZ has is the roll, where the camera will once again shift into a third person view while Jo dives and rolls on the ground. The purpose of this is to help in evading enemy fire, as the game explains, it makes it harder for the bad guys to lock on to you. Certainly has its advantages, but the part where it really shines is in the final boss battle. The roll is a substitute for jumping, which is absent from PDZ. Developers have stated that it was a conscious decision to help balance the dynamic of gameplay, hoping to keep players out of areas they aren't supposed to be able to get to in multiplay, as well as avoid having players bouncing around to avoid enemy fire. Some say a majority of the reason why jumping is not an option is because the game is rushed. Only the developers know for sure. The third person view is also taken when Jo goes up or down a ladder or takes a zipline to a new location. Similarly to taking cover, when a ladder or zipline is within reach, a visual cue will appear to let the player know. The cue for taking a ladder is much nicer than the walk up to it solution of so many other shooter games where it can be all too easy to interact with the ladder incorrectly and either have a difficult time getting down or managing to fall to your death. You are shown when you are allowed to interact with each when “Press 'A' to Use *x*” (*x* being replaced with whatever you are interacting with) appears on your screen and when you are climbing down a ladder you can hold 'A' to slide down the ladder, which is quite slick and a very nice game detail.

A nice new dynamic that has been added to the world of Perfect Dark is the ability that has previously been found in classic titles such as The Secret of Monkey Island, Loom, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, etc, which is being able to talk to certain enemies, what you say influencing what happens next. For instance, when facing off against the first boss briefly when your objective is to disable his jet before facing him for the last time later in the level, he will yell something at you and you are given the ability to choose between 1 of 3 categories for response: “Insult,” “Taunt,” and “Intimidate”, to which he'll reply in suit and continue to shoot at you. That part is fun, but what's better is later in the game when you attempt to infiltrate a safeguarded mansion and you kill a security guard and attempt to use his radio to convince people inside to shut down radio coms. At that point, activating the radio your voice pattern is remapped with a male's via a high-tech choker that Jo is wearing and a voice at the other end comes on, asking a question or making a statement and you have to figure out which out of the options of “Bluff,” “Charm” or “Threaten” is the correct response to get that person to shut down the coms. Definitely a nice throwback to a dynamic that was used long ago and a nice element to the story.

PDZ also features an inventive health system that borrows from the now all-but-standard Halo shield system but isn't 100% similar. Jo has a health bar that's encased by another bar that shows how much armor you have. The armor is fairly standard, when you get shot the level of shielding you have gets lower, but the health bar is where things get creative. Damage isn't simply taking away from your health, but you also don't have regenerating health in the true sense of the word. Most of the damage that occurs is known as “shock damage”, where your health will decrease, but not all of it is permanent. For example, if you fall off of a balcony and hit the ground, your green bar of health will go down but there will be a white bar that is either at the 'full' level or slightly close to full and if you don't get shot or fall off any other balconies in a certain amount of time your green health bar will refill to that spot. In certain firefights you can get shot a fair amount and still go back to full health if you are able to get to some cover and heal yourself for a few moments before attacking again. The harder the difficulty the longer your health takes to recharge and the less shock damage you take and the more permanent damage you take. It's a very interesting dynamic that is a welcome break from the norm.

The single-player campaign is a good enjoyable time, however multiplayer is where PDZ really shines. Not only is there the standard local, system link and Live multiplayer events such as Killcount (Deathmatch), Team Killcount, a territorial gain mode and Capture the Flag, there are some other modes such as an assault-like game known as Dark Ops, which has a few different modes to it: Eradication, Infection, Sabotage and Onslaught, each of which is supposed to support up to 32 players and up to 15 bots. The inclusion of bots is absolutely fantastic and a feature that is missing from way too many shooters these days. There has obviously been a good deal of effort put into the multiplayer aspect. Eradication is basically Last Man Standing from Unreal Tournament, Infection plays a great deal like the Virus mode in Timesplitters: Future Perfect where you try to be the last person to be infected, Sabotage is where your primary goal is to cause as much damage to the enemy's base as possible, and then there's Onslaught, in which your objective is to make an assault upon the enemy base to fulfill a particular objective.

Unfortunately, there are a number of negative things that can be said about PDZ and areas that can be addressed where it simply falls short of the rather sizable potential it had for being a fantastic shooter. Even more unfortunate is the fact that some of the things that make it a really good game are the very things that make it rather frustrating for one reason or another. The throwback of being able to taunt, charm, bluff, etc your enemies is very interesting, but when it comes to the point in time when you're expected to use the radio to have the comms shut down to make your infiltration of the mansion easier and soon after to get the person to open the main door to let you into the mansion it can be quite difficult because you can choose the wrong option of the 3 and the correct answer isn't always obvious so you can end up replaying the level a number of times in order to get it right (there are multiple things you have to respond to, so the one you had last time will be different next time) and in the harder difficulties when it takes quite a bit of effort to get to those points to begin with it can be very frustrating if you think you're going to say the right thing and you don't and have a tactical squad sent after you to “help”, as they say over the comms. What's especially annoying is in the 'Perfect Agent' difficulty (Hard), at the very end you need to use a voice recognizer in order to finish the first part of the level before facing off in a boss battle and if you do that wrong you fail the mission and have to play the entire thing over again. Frustrating barely covers it.

One area that's not particularly negative, just an opportunity missed, deals with the cover system. It's a nice feature and really proves to be invaluable, but it's slightly bugged and not all that it could've been. For instance, when you sneak up to the left edge of a metal crate to take cover and check to see where the enemies are located, sometimes your character will take cover on the right side instead of the left and there are other times where Jo will even take cover on the right side of the other face of the crate so that you're standing out in the open and any hopes of covert operations have been shot (no pun intended). It'd be nice if those little bugs had been cleaned up, but what would've really been nice is if cover mode was more interactive and the player had been given a greater deal of control. It would have been excellent if you could press yourself against a wall at any location on the wall and then slide alongside it to the edge to peek out and shoot or duck down, slide along a low flower planter and stand up at a location of choice to take some shots before ducking down again and moving to a new location and repeat.

Having such carefully and concretely scripted cover locations really limits a player and can also create problems since it's not like an enemy doesn't know where you're taking cover and it's pretty hard to take them out in later levels where there are swarms of them all shooting on your location at once. Furthermore, it's not like it isn't possible to make Jo able to slide along a wall in cover, such as in the games WinBack and Kill.Switch, both are third person games that depended a great deal on such maneuvers in order to take out enemies and remain alive, and this was back in January of 2001. There are other games that allow you to slide along walls and peek out to open fire on enemies and we will be seeing it again in the game Gears of War, an upcoming title for the Xbox 360. This isn't a new concept and it just goes to show the game was a wee bit rushed in its lack of a really robust cover system.

An interesting feature of PDZ that is a new twist on an old concept lay in the method of zooming in with a scoped weapon. Instead of having a click-style graduated scope as is in Halo / Halo 2 of zooming in one stop per button press, the scope will zoom in to each step depending on how far in the trigger is held. Each scoped weapon has 4 steps of scoping capability, so when the trigger is held at 1/4 of the way in the scope will go to 2x zoom, at 1/2 it will be at 4x (or 3x, depending on the weapon) and 3/4 is 8x (or 6x). It's an interesting concept, however if you are under heavy fire from multiple enemies the last thing you want to have to worry about is concentrating really hard on how you're pulling the trigger to zoom in for a headshot. Perhaps a better solution may have been to have the left joystick button zoom in and the right zoom out, but to each his own. It also would have been more effective if the trigger had a click stop of sorts to it, giving sensory feedback to what step of the scope you are on, making it less of a conscious thought and more of a reactive action.

Another giveaway that the final build of the game probably isn't the shining example of all it could've been comes in the shadow effects. A fair amount of the time that you see Jo's shadow, it looks like it's composed of pixels roughly 1" squared. In the rooftops level in a co-op game, the person who plays Jack has to enter a building and run up 3 flights of stairs, each has a hallway from one staircase to another and while in these hallways, the shadows of the enemies in the floor above can be seen on the walls.
The biggest pitfalls of the game have to do with the difficulty levels. It was excellent that like in the original Nintendo 64 game Perfect Dark the amount of objectives Joanna has to do increases depending on what difficulty it is, however in PDZ there is maybe one more objective and it's more of a side objective. There could've been a number of other objectives that could've been added, the storyline could've taken a bit of a detour to add a new objective, such as using a datathief to access a mainframe to track down a particular character in the building only to find out that your contact or contract or whoever is being escorted out of the building and you need to quickly figure out how to get there and stop the evacuation, etc. Another opportunity missed.

Also relating to the difficulty level is the difficulty curve that comes with it. Unfortunately, the harder the difficulty is set to, the harder it is to kill your enemies. This makes sense to a degree, as making characters harder to kill increases the difficulty of the game and forces a player to take more cover and be more strategic and less run-and-gun, but when it requires 8 headshots to remove a helmet and *then* be able to get a headshot kill, things are starting to be a little ridiculous, especially considering that starting weapons have a maximum of 3 clips or so. It would've been a more intelligent solution for the game to simply generate more opponents rather than have those that already exist end up being extraordinarily hard to kill at times. As is typical with many other shooters, the harder the difficulty is, the easier Joanna dies in combat. This is especially true when it comes to armor-piercing rounds of sorts, such as from a sniper rifle or a magnum that will only take up to 3 shots in order to put your character down. When there are 3 or more enemies on the screen, your chances of survival nearly flatline to nothing. More or less, the harder the difficulty gets the more you have to rely on taking cover and simply waiting for them to stop firing to attempt a headshot (unless they're wearing helmets). In the earlier levels this is mostly a minor annoyance, however in later levels it becomes quite aggravating, such as in the rooftops level when you must cover Jack. Jack does not seem to believe in cover and therefore you must put down anyone shooting at him exceptionally quickly or he will die from running into a room, firing his magnum blindly while multiple enemies unload on him, which segways in to the next point, AI.

Overall, the AI of PDZ is decent, but certainly not as good as we've seen in other games. The aforementioned point of Jack failing to ever take any sort of cover (with the exception of a cutscene or two, but that doesn't at all matter) makes the game unnecessarily difficult when you are forced to cover him from several enemies, half of which have sniper rifles. Without cover, he tends to die in a few seconds if you aren't quick enough. If you happen to be close to the end of a level and he dies, you'd better hope you have a good system going because you will be starting over. Another pitfall of PDZ is the lack of semi-frequent checkpoints, forcing a significant amount of whole level restarts. It would've been nice if Jack were given the enemy AI, as they tend to take cover fairly often and have decently coordinated attacks. They also have exceptional accuracy, making for another annoyance when it gets to the point that the only time you can take a shot at people is when no one happens to be shooting at you because in hard mode they *will* hit you and you will suffer significant damage. This obviously creates a real problem should you be in the aforementioned infiltration mission and fail to figure out which response you should have for the guard over the radio and a squad is sent out to nullify you. there are a couple checkpoints that are available to help thin their numbers, but with limited ammo allotted to you for the mission it's a pretty bad situation to be in at all.

As is typical of a majority of first person shooter titles nowadays, there are vehicles in PDZ. However, there are only 2 vehicles, a hovercraft and a personal-sized walker that is able to spread some wings and take flight. The hovercraft has a mounted turret that a second player can take control of and handles alright, however the walker / flyer is a little easier to use, however the only single-play level it appears in is a jungle level, which makes the enemies almost impossible to see from the air, typically leading to them gunning you down. A downside of the walker / flyer is that it's fairly weak and doesn't take a lot of damage. Some bad programming on the developer's parts is a welt in the eye of PDZ when you realize that if you are to very carefully snipe an enemy out of a flyer, you are unable to use their perfectly fine vehicle yourself, you can only use it in that one jungle level when you come across one that's unoccupied, and that's very close to the end as well, making it pretty much a worthless vehicle that probably shouldn't have even been in it.

The multiplayer of PDZ is quite good, especially the co-op play, that can be done on local, system link and Xbox Live. The maps in the game are scalable, depending on how many people are involved the maps can get larger or smaller, and these things really help contribute to the funfactor and replayability of the game. Headshots are a little too easy to have, though, and the bot skill is fairly high, even on the lowest difficulty. Another interesting aspect is that the game seems to move at a slower pace in multiplay than it does in single play. Not really a bad thing, just slightly disappointing. It is quite nice that up to 32 players can be in a single arena simultaneously, that makes for some heated, exciting battles.

Ultimately, PDZ is a very enjoyable game with a great deal of replay value, both from the multiplayer (deathmatch and co-op) and from the single player campaign, definitely a good title for rental if you are a fan of first person shooters or purchase if you have a tendency to love them all, however there are a fair amount of areas that could've been improved upon and some areas that show just how rushed the game was. As always, play for yourself to see whether or not you personally enjoy it.

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