A delay in finished code being made available meant that it wasn't possible to include the promised review of Perfect Dark Zero in issue 157 of Edge. Now that the final build is here, we're able to bring you the full review, which will also appear in E158.
Perfect Dark, a game ambitious to a fault yet dazzling in its sophistication, left for its sequel an opportunity to re-establish the era in which Rare once set the FPS standard. It, together with GoldenEye, tossed a high ball of advanced mission structure and multiplayer ingenuity that even Halo has since failed to intercept. And yet it’s to Bungie’s game – the near-complete package, stellar launch title and perennial Xbox brand icon – that Perfect Dark Zero will largely be compared. In failing to achieve anything like the same grade of professionalism and polish, and by resting on its ageing laurels all too often, Xbox 360’s chief launch title falls short.
Much can be put down to over-zealousness. Seldom has a flagship been so over laden with the ambitions of both creator and sponsor; Rare wants a sequel to one game, Microsoft another. Zero’s cargo consequently includes 14 singleplayer missions – each offering up divergent paths for cooperative play – together with a sprawling matrix of multiplayer modes and modifiers, near omnipresent Xbox Live support, optional objectives, difficulty-dependent objectives, secondary fire modes for all weapons, tertiary fire modes for many, puzzle-powered gadgets, AI bot support, operable vehicles – you get the idea.
Of course, such ambition is to be applauded, but what comes of it here is a violent strobe of quality, alternating so quickly between good and bad as to baffle the senses. While the series’ first steps into stealth, for example, were taxing and sometimes frustrating scrapes, five intervening years and an entire stealth genre has done nothing whatsoever to raise its game. It has, in fact, lowered it, since even the more conventional missions are set in levels more rats’ nests than tactical tests, making you frustratingly dependent on the directional chevrons that are laid down in order to guide you from one waypoint to the next – more often than not right under the noses of your supposedly vigilant targets.
Yet between the many moments when the AI lapses into a malfunctioning stupor, the run-and-gun, hide-and-dive combat proves satisfying. Taking cover should work better than it does: the related button prompt is hesitant to appear and, worse, capable of positioning you on the wrong side of a defensive corner. But something stubbornly compelling survives the many flaws. More so than in the first Dark, the weapons here are the real characters, while the various Datadyne and Carrington operatives attached to them are the appendages. Convincingly weighty at a mere glance, they encourage strategic play via secondary functionality, igniting both the screen and the motors of the 360 pad with their fire.
Zero’s stabs at drama, though, are comical, and its comic interludes cringeworthy. As suggested by the kaleidoscopic appearance of Dark herself in recent months, it has no defining character beyond crude anime and the adolescent cliché that a self-respecting No One Lives Forever title would know to avoid. Visually, it’s a grim exercise in the overuse of cosmetics and the undervaluation of design, the occasional sunbeam glancing off a weapon in mid-reload as a picturesque horizon chances into view providing some respite from the unsubtle and distracting bump-mapping that clogs every pore. More trying is the soundtrack, a contrived barrage of espionage-themed electronica and rock that’s relentless to the point of brutality. Incidental dialogue, meanwhile, is routinely moronic.
Penetrating these messy layers, however, reveals a multiplayer suite that goes to great lengths to reimburse. Cooperative play is a small step forward – partial proof that paired players needn’t ride on the same rail – but it nonetheless shares the same flawed framework as the regular story. The detailed environments still conspire to overly camouflage the enemy, signposting is delegated to the chevron trail, frames repeatedly glitch, and the infrequent boss battles remain strategically barren tests of the most basic techniques. But given enough players, communicators and, if necessary, bots, the twin competition modes of Deathmatch and Dark Ops are as close to a saving grace as Zero is going to get.
Splitting all-out and tactical game types between them, the two modes are stuffed with features. Six maps – moderately ambitious in layout yet immense in scale – are available, while additional bases can be coupled prior to play to expand the arena, and each local district contained within is prominently identified upon entry to ease coordination. It’s here, amid the laboured animations and awkward ragdolling, that the full capability of the game’s weapon and movement systems is brought to bear.
Running at pace with guns holstered, stealing weapons and changing clips mid-roll are all practices worth learning, the purposefully unbalanced vulnerabilities of bodies below and above the neck making headshots a painstaking but supremely rewarding technique. The system of picking up and discarding arms, however, often leads to the surrender of vital split-seconds as you dance back and forth, holstering what you wish to retain while acquiring precise position above a chosen weapon. But while such mechanical fumbles grate, the game’s tactical elements are entirely constructive, especially those that Counter Strike players will immediately recognise as their own.
Given the game’s marketing as one woman’s war against the corporations, the irony of Perfect Dark Zero is that the quality of the gaming experience it offers degrades in parallel with the number of people playing it. Mass multiplayer matches show the game at its strategic, riotous best, but while smaller matches still reward and coop wrings the best from the mission design, there’s no question that Zero is a far better competitive sport than it is a personal quest.
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da un altra parte gli avevano dato 9.7 o roba del genere...
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