Perfect Dark Review [Rare Replay] (XB1)

  Perfect Dark is a lot like Dark Souls. You start each missions with no clue what the hell the game is asking you to do. Sure, there are nebulous objectives like “Bug the Radar” or “Lower the Force Field”, but until you fail a few times it may as well ask you to “Keep Fucking Up Until You Don't”. Something as menial as turning right down a hallway instead of left could easily result in a fail state and a necessary restart. Fortunately, like Dark Souls, Perfect Dark is a lot of fun to play.

  The controls and game design are relics of their era. The auto-aim is more than generous, and it's an absolute blast tooling around labyrinthine, sparsely decorated levels murdering a small army of foes that range from comically clueless to frustratingly brutal. It's not too far removed from the genre's DOOM roots and it shows. It's worth noting that the Perfect Dark game included in the Rare Replay collection is the backward compatible 360 version, not the original N64 game. This is an oddity in it's own right, as you're revisiting a remake that for the most part is just high-rez textures layered on top of low polygon models. Strangely, Xbox Live support seems to be excluded from this version, though local splitscreen is available.

  You fill the shoes of Joanna Dark, special agent (I think...). She's for all intents and purposes a James Bond stand in, which isn't a huge surprise as this is Rare's FPS follow up to the insanely popular Goldeneye, minus the licensing nightmare infamously associated with that game. Or at least that's how it appears on the surface... What starts as a Blade Runner-esque future spy thriller takes some sharp, quirky turns without batting an eye. Along with a number of stereotypical “Bond” villians you'll be squaring off against a hostile alien race and protecting an A.I. flying laptob.  It's a weird game and each mission ends up feeling quite disjointed from the others, but it never takes itself seriously. Joanna is hot as shit, too, which is extremely impressive for a lump of blocks with a face scan whose mouth never moves when she speaks.

  Choosing a difficulty level to tackle a mission on affects more than just your enemies' health or their damage output. Each setting changes the objectives required to pass the stage, becoming increasingly more difficult and asking you to explore the environment more meticulously. This is a cool feature; one I wish was still being explored in modern games. That's assuming you figure out how to get into the game proper, though...

  My first experience with Perfect Dark wasn't kind to my patience. The menus are kind of a mess. The first option presented (“Carrington Institute”) is easy to mistake for the main game; selecting this drops you into a large facility you are free to explore and accept challenges from NPCs residing in the many rooms and easy-to-get-lost-in halls. This feels like a tutorial, and it kind of is... but I don't believe you can advance to the meat of the game from this mode. This caused me to waste more than a couple hours wandering aimlessly in this mansion feeling like I was “missing” something, when the answer was to exit the game and pick the second option from the menu to play the actual campaign (“Solo Missions"... which sounds like “Bonus/Extra Missions" to me...) This did the game no favors in my eyes on my initial playthrough on 360, and I abandoned Perfect Dark until the Rare Replay release. I am glad I did give it a second chance.

  Yes, randomly failing levels because of beginner's traps sounds terrible and it can be frustrating before you fall into the flow of the game, but once you find that groove it becomes apparent this was custom built for speedrunners before speedrunning was really a thing. Once you understand the layouts of the levels and how to accomplish your tasks you can easily finish most of the stages in under ten minutes without trying. This takes the sting out of the trial-and-error gameplay, and makes inching your way forward a satisfying accomplishment instead of unfair punishment. The speedrunning aspect is further cemented through a prevalent online leaderboard comparing your time to your friends' after each mission. I'm not a fan of speedrunning at all, but this feature just lays bear the underlying structure of the game, and I appreciated the act of progression and personal improvement through each “run” of a level.

  Perfect Dark is scripted, linear, and it's an odd mishmash of updated ideas to an aging formula that are themselves starting to become relics. It's also still very, undeniably fun to shoot a crossbow arrow into a guard's heart, punch out a stewardess and steal her uniform, use that to sneak aboard Air Force One, then protect the President from alien invaders. Joanna Dark might not be James Bond, but her sharp-edged polygonal ass is certainly much nicer to look at.