4th July 2023, 1:57 AM
Soon after the success of Goldeneye, Rare's star team began work on it's successor, Perfect Dark. It's development had numerous delays brought on by inside challenges however. Midway through the new game's development, key members of the original Goldeneye team left to form Free Radical. Fortunately, they had completed a lot of the preliminary development work that the remaining members could build from. Numerous designs from other departments at Rare were brought together to form a new star team. They had a basic outline, but they opted for a "add whatever you think is cool to this game" approach at this point in development. Whole new gun modes, weird interactions, the plot growing even more bizarre, and plopping in numerous gameplay modes and graphical tweaks. They did all of this right up until the very last moment. As an example of the sort of madhouse environment at work here, the well praised reload animations were done by one programmer on a whim a few weeks before the game went gold.
This also resulted in one of the longest threads here at Tendo City. The anticipation for Perfect Dark was met with delay after delay, while all these troubles and oddities behind the scenes were hidden from public view. Fortunately, when the game finally came out (a year after the release of the Dreamcast and the start of the next generation of consoles beyond the N64), all those delays and additional work turned out to be worth it. However, the question that comes up is this. Should the game have been delayed into a Gamecube launch title, like both Star Fox Adventures and Eternal Darkness? Were the performance hits taken by pushing the N64 harder than it had been up until that point worth the, at the time, amazing visuals? The good news is, we have the best of both worlds now. The game has been ported to the XBox 360 since then, with smooth 60FPS gameplay and enhanced textures and models. I'll be focusing most of my review on the N64 original, but I'll have a section at the end regarding the 360 version afterwards. It's that second version that's delayed this review for so long, what with it's added "Award" challenges and new 201% completion rating challenge. With all that said, let's get started on what is often considered to be Goldeneye's superior and see if it lives up to that reputation.
--- Story ---
It's the year 2023. The world belongs to a consolidated collection of mega corporations who's inventions revolutionize both civilian and military activity. Global conflicts now focus on information. Megacorps are developing advanced AI who's morality is questionable. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is vast. The U.S. President appears to be a tool of the corporate class and even agents controlling the NSA seem to have heavy ties to them. Pollution, war, and the steady effects of climate change still run amok. In the midst of all of this, rumors of unidentified flying objects and even deeper secrets the governments seem to have witnessed have recently resurfaced thanks to odd videos.
Anyway, enough talking about the news, let's get onto the game's story. Why yes, I DID rush through both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark's modern ports in this specific year JUST to make that joke in this review, but it is stunning just how well this absolutely ridiculous game's initial story lines up with the actual year 2023. As to the rest, yes the story is ridiculous video gamey tropes. The original concept was inspired by a combination of James Bond, X-Files, and Cyberpunk. They had the idea to make the lead character a woman right from the start. They simply thought it was about time they had a female lead in one of their games and worked around that. "Wokeness" has always existed, and we're richer for it. There are conflicting reports on where the name came from. Originally some developers said Joanna Dark was supposed to sound like Joan of Arc, but a few years back another developer revealed that this was just a happy coincidence they later capitalized on. The name for the character stemmed from the game's name, and the game's name was simply mashing together a bunch of cool sounding words until they found something they all liked the sound of. In any event, what we get is a complicated setting involving two megacorps at war with each other, each secretly allied with one of two alien groups competing to reach a hidden ancient weapon on the sea floor. It's themes are largely incidental to the setting they wanted to play with. The whole thing is pretty self aware with Joanna's own reactions to how much stranger and stranger events get playing a bit of comic relief. Unlike Goldeneye, which had a movie to fall back on if players wanted some more backstory, Perfect Dark had to expand it's cut scenes to develop things a bit more. The cut scenes were fully voiced, but the developers still had to keep them short both to avoid losing player interest and to conserve limited ROM space. They opted to have almost every line of dialog simply push the plot forward. There's almost nothing to really latch onto for character exploration here, but fortunately there are a few interesting moments. For my part, I love the moment Cassandra reveals just what kind of person she is simply by revealing she is willing to sacrifice her own life to save one of her enemies if it means getting revenge on the group that betrayed her. For the rest, you get a selection of cliché characters with not all that much depth to them, but they play the roles well and they're fun enough. Elvis in particular is a rather adorable alien buddy that's generally enjoyable every time he's in a scene. By the end of all this, Joanna manages to single handedly slay the leader of an alien empire and allow her ally aliens to bombard the capital, saving the sector. Typical stuff. The game does do it's best to try and hide a lot of the story twists and turns, but the ad campaign more or less spoiled a lot of it before the game had even come out. Elvis' head is right there on the box and numerous promotional materials make it very clear this will eventually involve aliens. All in all, the story is the bare essentials, but I'd say it's more interesting to follow along than Goldeneye's if only for the creative mashup of genres. Like Goldeneye, it's enough to keep you following along to see where it goes next, and nothing more.
--- Visuals ---
A few years had passed since Goldeneye had introduced mocap to FPS games and the genre on PC had expanded by leaps and bounds since then. The likes of Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, and System Shock 2 had released the previous year. Further, a competitive to the "female lead secret spy shooter" space would release only a few months after Perfect Dark with No One Lives Forever, and Free Radical's own first Time Crisis came out around the same time as that, so Perfect Dark was racing against it's own subgenre, just barely beating those two to market. Visually, it couldn't compete in a lot of ways with any of those titles, limited by the N64 hardware as it was when the Dreamcast was already out and the PS2 was right around the corner. However, it still managed to introduce effects not yet seen in other shooters of the time. It managed to simulate real time lighting effects throughout levels based on destroying light sources by creating multiple light maps per level and using that to base what is and isn't lit up. Further, blood effects were expanded to stain surroundings, though in a limited way compared to what later games would do, and the game layered on numerous trippy visual effects in many of the special weapon modes, such as fisheye stretching when using a Slayer rocket or after images when punch-drunk by fists or a neutron bomb. It did all this while greatly expanding the size of various levels compared to what they were in Goldeneye. While Unreal was still champion of raw visual fidelity at this point, Perfect Dark still managed to do JUST enough to catch interest at the time.
However, this came at a cost. The N64 simply didn't have enough memory to handle all this AND all the large levels in the game at once. The game required the recently released "Expansion Pak", which plugged into a slot on the top of the console and doubled it's memory. This was advertised as making the system "run faster", but this isn't accurate. All it provided was additional memory but the system ran just as fast as it had before. Some games could use this extra memory to store higher resolution textures and thus perform at higher resolutions, but the clock speed was unchanged. In fact, running at that higher resolution would often slow games down more than they already were, and thus it was often recommended to either disable the high res mode or simply swap back to the jumper cart to force the game to play at the lower resolution in order to boost performance. In the case of Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64, and Majora's Mask, the memory requirements of the games' designs required more memory to run at all. Perfect Dark in particular did have a high resolution mode, but it's hit on performance is bad enough that turning it off is one of the recommended options to make the game "playable". Fortunately, Rare's developers seemed to realize this and so it is already off by default. Further, technically the game is "playable" without the expansion pack, but most of the game modes have been disabled, including single player, and limiting multiplayer to some smaller levels in two-player only.
This brings us to what it runs like in this ideal state, expansion pak inserted and low res enabled. Frankly, it isn't good. Goldeneye was bad, Perfect Dark is worse. Is it that far from Goldeneye? No, I'd say it's only a few frames difference. However, when the two games are running in the teens to begin with, a few frames can feel a lot more significant. At it's worst, the game dips below 10 FPS, and if you do something as foolish as to set up chain reaction remote mines and gaze into the explosive chain reaction, the game will crawl at handful of frames a second. Fortunately, that latter example is something someone would have to intentionally set up and it's the sort of thing that could be done in Goldeneye as well. (In fact, in the XBox 360 remaster, chain reaction explosions even cause that game to slow down. I suspect that explosions weren't coded particularly well in these games.) Here's the good news. Much like Goldeneye, the programmers were especially careful about how the game handled slowdown, so key frames are prioritized making sure that what does get animated are either the results of player action or the result of enemy action if at all possible. This makes the game feel far more responsive than it otherwise would without that optimization, even at the low frame rate, and thus brings it back into being playable and allowing for accurate movement, aim, and actions taking place without delay.
The art design leans further towards sci-fi and a slightly more stylized look than Goldeneye did. While faces still use photos skinned onto the models, they now use more bright and almost comic-book colors, and the characters are equally bright and bold with clear silhouettes. While the art still veers towards the realistic side thus preventing the visuals from aging very well even one generation on, they fair better than Goldeneye's strictly "movie realistic" aesthetic does. It was a needed change to allow the humans of this world to fit in better with the aliens and alien environments in the latter half of the game though. Otherwise, Elvis or Mr. Blonde would have stood out horribly. Along with that art are two very distinct visual styles for the two alien races in the game. Elvis comes from standard Grey aliens from American folklore, called the Maians in this setting. Their bodies are sleek smooth silver without visible mouths and their weapons are equally inscrutable, literally melting their ammunition into themselves to reload. The Skedar by contrast are tall imposing dinosaur-like monsters full of jagged angles and hard edges in green, only to ultimately be revealed to be pretending to that kind of strength and actually being tiny little snakelike entities that use bio-armor to wage war. Their weapons feel like a mix of high tech and barbarism, reloading in a more traditional way yet using everything from destructive energy to literal screaming explosives. Humans have the most recognizable weapons, but being set in a cyberpunk future and working for a secret organization, they have a distinct flavor. One is a laptop that transforms into a gun, another is a rather rectangular pistol that still manages to look sleep. The mines even have an odd glow to them. You know... future glow. Oh yes, and the shields. They resemble the blocky shields from David Lynch's Dune movie, only colorized to indicate how much charge remains.
Environments stay interesting enough to look distinct throughout. Every building seems to have it's own aesthetic. Area 51 has stretched out hexagonal tunnels that are medical-bay-white (and with pointless caution stripes all over the place instead of just at the point of danger, but that's a typical cliché that can be forgiven). The G5 building has numerous very tight corridors built into stone. Carrington's villa is an island paradise resort of sorts. The Cetan superweapon is a bioship that's alive with green living walls and biological turrets in the ceiling. The Skedar homeworld is a holy place yet the very capital already looks run down with broken pillars and malfunctioning doors, as though the Skedar themselves did far more damage to their world before you even discovered it. The downtown area is every cyberpunk dystopia, eternally raining and full of flying cars, dangerous security robots, and agents trying to keep everything in order. There's also a frozen expanse in Alaska, the inside of the plane Air Force One, the luxury office of dataDyne, and the clean professional Carrington Institute, to name a few more. This keeps the game feeling fresh and prevents the areas from getting too stale, save for when a level is reused, which happens more often here than in Goldeneye, but I'll get into that later.
--- Sound ---
The game's sound design is excellent, as it was with Goldeneye but enhanced even further. Unique sounds for running on various surfaces, panting, random bits of often hilarious commentary from enemies, solid punchy weapon sound effects, reload sounds ranging from simply satisfying to outright surreal, and all the numerous ambiance layered throughout each level. It all comes through as rich as the visuals do, and unlike said visuals, the sounds still hold up. When the music is "calm", take a listen. City streets are bustling with the sounds of distant events going on in roads just out of sight. Buildings have running ventilation and computers beeping in the background. Alien ships and worlds have strange unrecognizable yet consistent sounds throughout. Even Carrington's Villa has a sea breeze and the occasional sound of waves when outside. The music is a microcosm of the game's own development. Grant Kirkhope returned to take over composing duties after Graeme Norgate left for Free Radical, yet both had worked together on Goldeneye's soundtrack. Other artists also contributed, but these two, while not exactly working as collaboratively as they had on Goldeneye, still managed an absolutely stunning and addictive soundtrack. Aside from some obvious inspiration from Bond that had to stay a lot further away from that franchise this time around, they implemented numerous more "surreal" instrumentation inspired by the theme of the X-Files, and also implemented heavy "synth" inspired by movies like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. The mixture of all these flavors came together to make a soundtrack that's a joy to listen to even without playing the game, like many Rare soundtracks. Much like Goldeneye, the game used queues to switch up songs midlevel to emphasize the situation. Sneaking uses much more subdued calmer music with that nervous edge. Combat switched to much more action packed music. Full alert emergencies ramp it up to a panic. Multiplayer also makes use of a lot of this music, and further allows players to select which music they want to play and even create a playlist. If you don't like a song, it can be stricken off entirely, though generally I simply stick with "random" myself.
I suppose it would be enough to summarize this as "Rare did Rare quality work" here. The sounds pop, the music's catchy and sets the right mood.
--- Controls ---
The game's controls are taken straight from Goldeneye, and like Goldeneye the ideal control setup is 1.2, which is more or less a "southpaw" version of the standard modern twin stick controls, replacing the right stick with the four C buttons. The game now has a number of interesting tweaks on top of this. Firstly, "head wobble" can now be disabled. This makes aiming far easier especially when running or sniping. My first time through the game I insisted on playing with this turned "on", but frankly I was making things harder on myself for no good reason. All it does is implement a random wobble players must contend with, so disabling it leaves it purely up to player skill. Plus, for those who really want to go for speed running, they'll want this off to better their chances. The game now has a cursor outside of "precise aiming" mode, so even while moving one can see exactly where they're going to shoot without resorting to putting sticky tack on the screen. The cursor itself is also much more subtle. It's smaller, semitransparent, and has a bit of a "range finding" aspect along the sides to really give a good impression of where the shot's coming from and where it's going, in case the player has a bad case of cotton eye. Corner leaning works just as it did before, and now ducking has a bit more nuance. In Goldeneye, being able to run while crouching was more of an accidental blessing that required very particular timing to pull off. In Perfect Dark, they took that and made it intentional design. Not only can players now move while crouched, there are now two levels of crouching, allowing a range of movement/profile tradeoffs. Using that particularly well timed button combination from Goldeneye now quick-ducks from fully standing to fully crouched, to save time.
Then there's the "quick menu". This feature is becoming standard in games these days, but Perfect Dark was the pioneer. By holding down the weapon switch button, a circular "quick menu" comes up. Point the analog stick in the direction of the item one wants to use and the game will switch right to it. This is much faster than manually switching most of the time, and also keeps players "in the action" better than pausing and manually selecting equipment (though the latter is still possible and very important for speed runs). If player inventory passes a certain point, pressing the trigger while in this menu switches to a second, and a third. Commands to A.I. allies take up the last "page" of this quick menu.
Once again, the fastest way to move involves diagonal running at JUST the right angle, which is easily done using the c-buttons in the 1.2 control scheme. I've noticed that the most popular shooters to speed run are the ones that involve skillful running tricks. There's something satisfying about utilizing some hidden method to get the best speed. Doom has wall-running. Quake has bunny hopping. GE/PD has diagonal running. All of them require a certain level of skill to utilize properly and mitigate movement commitments. In Goldeneye, the diagonal run was an unintended glitch, but in Perfect Dark they've specially calibrated the par times around the expectation of it's use. They didn't bother to fix the glitch and instead seem to fully endorse it now. It's such a wonderful thing when developers embrace techniques that add to the replayability of a game rather than clamp down on them.
All in all, the controls have been tightened and expanded but the general physics still feel very much like Goldeneye. For those who played the former, they'll feel right at home and then some here.
--- Game Design ---
Here's the crux of it! First, let me recap what I said in my Goldeneye review. That game created a new subgenre of FPS that emphasized exploration through numerous paths to discover solutions to unique objectives for each mission, very often allowing unique solutions so long as the core objective flag was triggered. It also heavily emphasized sneaking, though not to the extent of true "tactical espionage action" games like Metal Gear or Thief, which had already come out by this point. Further, with games like System Shock 2 out, there were now games that competed and even surpassed in terms of world interactivity while still providing solid shooting mechanics. However, Perfect Dark wasn't ready to just rest on what made Goldeneye's level design work so well. It expanded. Now the game wouldn't just add new objectives on higher difficulties. It would alter them entirely or shift locations of key items or enemies around based on the difficulty. Where Goldeneye made things more interesting and deeper with each new playthrough on a higher difficulty, Perfect Dark made each difficulty feel like a different path through the game. It wasn't incredibly rich or deep. Only some levels even did that, but the ones that did really stuck out. Further, numerous choices made in previous levels would affect later levels down the line. It becomes a good strategy at times to replay a level and pick a different option to make a later level's status shift a little. This sort of thing truly made player agency matter in a way Goldeneye didn't quite have. As examples, in Carrington's Villa, on lower difficulty, you are tasked with saving a negotiator as a sniper secretly inserted on a nearby hill. On the highest difficulty, you ARE the "negotiator", and you have to fight your way out of the situation yourself. In Area 51, during the escape, depending on the difficulty you may find Jo's brother Jonathan early on, or have to search deeper into the base to locate him. In that same level, near the end, Jonathan says he'll open the gates to allow you and Elvis to escape while he escapes on a jetbike. If you intercept him instead and stand in front of him, Jo will say she'll do that and Jonathan will escape instead. If you do this, later on Jonathan will still be alive to aid you when the institute gets invaded. The most significant change based purely on difficulty is the Cetan ship itself. The level consists of reaching numerous sections via teleporters, and depending on difficulty, the "middle" section is a completely different layout in each difficulty. Numerous little changes, and consequences to choices, are littered here and there throughout the game and it all adds up to make the game a richer experience that's a lot more interesting to play multiple times.
The levels themselves are still filled with numerous interactable objects, only this time with a wider range of effects which does make sense considering the sci-fi setting. There's computers that can be found that open hidden compartments or paths through levels (revealing secret weapons or just a shortcut to take certain enemies by surprise), windows that can be opened, and oh so very many pretty shiny buttons. The spy tools are the same kind of eclectic bunch to be found in Goldeneye, with the added bonus that more of them are optional this time around. For example, there is a level where you need to hack a taxi to create a distraction by remotely crashing it into a security bot. Except.. you don't need to do that. There's a remote drone hidden somewhere in the level and it can be fit with a bomb and asploded to create a distraction another way. In this same level, guards can be lured out to open certain locked shutters to give you more hiding places, including an entrance to a um... gentleman's club underground. As for the level's layouts, just like Goldeneye they're often filled with numerous paths and often useless side areas simply to give the area a more "lived in" feel, as though it's a real place. This also adds to routing options or simply hiding places over time. Certain level "equivalents" may be noted by Goldeneye players. The Alaskan wilderness "crash site" is much like the "Surface" levels, save that there's a whole underground section and mountains cut the aboveground region into sections. However, one thing can't be compared. Goldeneye had lots of "remnants" of it's early design as an on-rails shooter, where Perfect Dark was never intended for that. So, there are far fewer sections that look like they came out of Time Crisis here, and nothing like the "Train" level. One other thing worth noting is the player can "fall off" far more places than in Goldeneye. While some invisible fences still exist, for the most part the player is free to jump from higher levels to lower if there's no visible obstruction.
I should mention the cheese! During development, one of the designers commented to the map creator that something he'd made looked like a wedge of cheese. He decided to turn this into a running gag and put an intentional piece of cheese into every map in the game. Finding them all is yet another secret to explore, although there's no in-game tracking for it so it's just for your own satisfaction.
There is one downside to these levels with all their richness, and that's how many get reused. I'm not going to count cases like how the external of Area 51 and the internal are technically all one big map, because in practice you can't actually get to one section when playing the other so they effectively play out as two very distinct levels. I AM going to count that the "inside" section is done twice, once going in the other going out. The same goes for the main building section of dataDyne, and in fact the bonus levels unlocked at higher difficulties are also all reused levels. Not counting the bonus levels, the game only reuses as many as Goldeneye did, but counting those? Not a single bonus level is a unique location. There's four of them, but one's basically a mini-game that can be disregarded for this, leaving three. The game is one level shy of Goldeneye's count after that, and again, the bonus levels are reused. Don't misunderstand. They are reused in clever ways that make for unique strategy, but it's still lacking in comparison. All in all though, having replayed the Goldeneye and Perfect Dark levels so many times these past few months, I love them all, but Perfect Dark's level design (mostly) edges out what came before.
One last point to mention. Unlike Goldeneye, this game has a hub level called the Carrington Institute. This is a place to "relax" and calm down between tense missions. All the NPCs have some cute things to say. There's computers that add in details on current progress in the story, character bios, equipment information, and a few training facilities on top of that. The um.... "simulation room" (that looks like a holodeck straight from The Next Generation) creates holograms simulating things like navigating security lasers or locating switches. The gadget room has a hidden training hall teaching you how to use the gadgets. The massive storage rooms have hovering crates and a hoverbike you can play around with. (Here's a hint. Yes you can actually ride the hover bike. You have to press the interact button twice to get on or off. I didn't know this for an embarrassingly long time because it isn't actually documented anywhere in or out of the game in the manual.) Oh and yes, here's one you'll spend the most time with. The armory has a shooting range and you unlock more challenges in it by unlocking more weapons throughout the game (by finding and picking it up at least once in a level then finishing it, both in the campaign or in combat challenges). They range from bronze to gold and are all tailor made specifically for each weapon. Some can be very challenging, especially the ones that involve tossing explosives, but they can be rewarding when you find the unique tricks for tackling each of them. For the most part, these help you learn the full ins and outs of each weapon, but some of the training levels are a little "weak" in this regard. All in all, the institute is a wonderful addition, and if you think it's vast design is a bit overkill for what's actually there... well you're not wrong. Wait for it. No level design goes wasted in Perfect Dark.
Unfortunately, unlike the later Time Splitters series, there is no map editor. While Time Splitters would eventually have map editors so powerful they allowed for fully functional campaign levels with objectives to be set up, Perfect Dark is limited to the levels included. Recently, modders have set about fixing this with new map editing available to the retro game, but this was not available at the time of the game's release. This sets it, and Goldeneye, behind the likes of Quake and Doom which had custom level design built in right from the start.
Now we come to the enemy design. Let's get this out of the way. You can't shoot hats off guards any more. Apparently this was a result of changes that allowed different head sizes among guards, including alien heads of course, which made the hats no longer sit "right" on different heads, so they just baked the hats right into different head models. Maybe an extra week of development could have resolved that, but they decided to focus on other things. What did they focus on? Everything else. Now you can shoot guns out of a guard's hands, or even just walk up and disarm them. They may surrender if they are alone or hurt or otherwise weighted towards their "fear" factor, or they may decide to run away, or fight back. If they fight back, being close to them is a bad idea. They can melee you too, including knocking your weapons out of your hand, or they could reach down and pick a gun up off the ground, or they may have a gun or two or twenty stashed away in their clothes. All around, AI has been improved dramatically since the last game. In fact, while pathfinding has never been their strong suit, their general behaviors for handling what you may throw at them are beyond what's put in a lot of today's tube-quest cinematic shooters. Trying to lure an enemy chasing you around a corner so you can blow them away the moment they pass through the door? They may just hold back and try to lure you out instead. They may know you're a floor above and chuck an n-bomb at you to hit with the AOE. They may run and group up with more to rush back to you. They may... be able to see you over railings and fire back over them! You can no longer rely on rushing at a guard and ducking to karate chop their knees to death. Their new melee options allow them to handle that. Other than this, familiar weaknesses remain. Enemies pulling out their weapon have little room to adjust their aim if you decide to dash behind them before firing, leaving them wide open. Their animations usually need to fully complete as well. Of course, the "slowly walking forward while holding down the trigger on an automatic" animation remains, and it's as deadly as ever if you can't get behind them before it starts, so find cover instead. Of course, it's worth mentioning the aliens and their AI. The maians are basically a race of oddjobs with big heads, so their AI has all the same strengths and weaknesses. By comparison, we have the Skedar. Their AI is... much more simplistic, and since the last few levels feature them almost exclusively, it leads to them being a bit of a disappointment. They either rush straight at you or plant their feet and just fire away. No clever flanking or strategies of any kind, because they're built to be brutal almost like wild animals. They're still dangerous though at least, just not as well... interesting as the earlier human enemies.
Perfect Dark's legacy certainly can't ignore it's unique weaponry. In keeping with Perfect Dark's "throw everything at the wall" development hurricane, the weapons are a huge collection of very unique concepts with no regard paid towards balance, and I like it that way. This game uses a "secondary fire" concept that many games use today, but in this case the secondary fire modes are usually very different from primary modes. They range from incredible to practically useless to ways to make up for controller limitations. Punching has a secondary disarm mode, which is one of the most useful capabilities in the game. Pistols have a secondary smack mode, which is probably the least useful save for being able to quickly knock out someone you're holding up with a gun. I'll go ahead and mention all the faves everyone does as well. The laptop gun converts into a throwable automated turret. The Cyclone allows firing an entire clip in the space of two seconds. The CMP-150 has a "Fifth Element" secondary where you can pass the cursor over up to five enemies, and the weapon auto-aims towards them each in turn until they are dead. The Callisto NTG switches to a slower firing high impact mode that goes through doors, thin walls, and rows of enemies. The Slayer fires a screaming explosion that can be remote controlled. The wrist mounted laser switches between Moonraker and "cutting beam", combining the two items from Goldeneye. The Dragon allows you to throw the weapon down as a proximity mine, which is especially cruel a trick in multiplayer. The sniper rifle's secondary is... crouching. Yes, you can crouch in the game anyway, but the way the controls are set up, the zoom function of the sniper rifle is mapped to the same buttons as crouching, so they had to just use the secondary for that. It's a shame.
All in all though, these secondary features result in many new approaches to levels and their challenges. Many can be treated as additional gadgets allowing playthroughs to become far more varied. The laptop gun can be tossed in a heavily guarded room to clear it out, or simply to defend you while you hack a console. The Remote control rocket can be used to take out a distant important target from safety, or simply to speed up progress through the level. It's these that truly make playing with all these unique levels fun. While the weapons are NOT balanced taken as a whole, their deployment in each level is. Like Goldeneye, you can't carry weaponry from one level to the next and start with fixed loadouts, dependent on POS (Procure on Site) to better equip yourself in each stage. This can feel a little silly at times when a stage literally takes place right on the other side of a door you finish the last level going through, but it means that the challenges can be tailored very specifically to the tasks at hand. Multiplayer likewise uses specially configured loadouts that are roughly balanced in power, but it does allow you to completely ignore this and make custom weapon loadouts instead. Both of these things are critical, because there exists the Farsight. This is generally considered the most overpowered weapon in gaming for a reason. It's an alien railgun with an X-Ray scope and AI target finding. You can sit in some secluded corner of a level and just snipe everything through any number of walls, and the hit is an instant kill on contact. Well, if the target has shields the first shot destroys the shields, and the second is an instant kill. It also fires very slowly, and aiming through the scope means you have no situational awareness. These are the very few advantages opponents have when facing this gun. Limiting it to a very small number of levels prevents it from utterly breaking the game, but oh how much fun it is when you finally do get it.
Classic Goldeneye weapons do exist in the game, but only as cheat codes and they can't be used in multiplayer unfortunately. Instead, they're only for later playthrough. These weapons are unlocked by completing shooting range challenges back at the Institute, as mentioned earlier.
--- Multiplayer ---
In Goldeneye, the multiplayer mode was a last minute addition by one developer that turned into the game's most popular mode. It's no wonder then that Perfect Dark would put a big focus on greatly expanding and focusing on the multiplayer right from the start. Fortunately, this didn't come at the expense of the single player campaign. Instead, it enhanced it.
Co-op mode was added, thanks to the popularity of this mode in Doom and Quake. This addition involved certain tweaks to the level design to keep the game challenging with the extra character joining. In this case, that extra character is (usually) Velvet Dark, a sort of "Luigi" style sibling to Joanna which the story fails to acknowledge. In fact, the co-op character can even be bot controlled complete with some basic player-input commands. Co-op drastically improves the appeal of the single player campaign, so long as those playing it are willing to handle the rapid "quit and restarts" that failing objectives in a game like this brings. Co-op also has it's own saved progression, so a full completion requires doing this mode as well. In a few cases, the AI will actually get in the way (such as Mr. Blonde's Revenge) so it's probably more ideal in those cases to have a human player or even just to select a human ally and then just leave player 2's controller alone. Some levels change enemy spawn locations, numbers, or health/shield levels. Others shift a few objective locations slightly, others make the two players spawn far apart, and some even alter how certain cut scene triggers work. (The escape from dataDyne has a section where you automatically walk through a gate, but in co-op this automated walk is disabled so that whatever player didn't go through isn't locked in place when it happens.) A lot of care was put into it, and it's appreciated even if they didn't bother adding par times for cheats to this mode. It should be noted that as for playing with an AI controlled companion, a few alternate companions with their own AI can be unlocked. However, they are treated as "cheats" and thus can't be used to gain progression.
Counter-op is a brand new concept involving having player 1 play through a stage solo, while player 2 hops from body to body like a Matrix Agent, using their death (including by using a suicide pill) to springboard into a random other NPC's body. The counter agent's objective is to cause a failed mission for player 1. This can include pushing things in front of doors, setting up traps if they have the right weapon for it, or simply helping to alert guards. However, the counter agent can't destroy mission critical objects. In practice, the mode is weighted very heavily in favor of the main player. Not only does the counter agent have very low health and are unable to carry inventory with them, they will often be forced to spawn in a body very far from the player. Killing themselves or other enemies in order to get ammo or spawn closer is also very counter productive as it can make even Perfect Agent difficulty a cakewalk. It's a creative mode, but unfortunately it ends up not being all that fun to be a counter agent chasing and failing to make even a dent in an experienced player's progress. This mode doesn't track progress in the N64 original and isn't counted towards completion. This makes sense, since it's pretty easy to "suicide cheat" your way through every mission at every difficulty.
Combat Simulator is the real star of the show. This is the multiplayer competitive component from Goldeneye, vastly amped up. This mode includes new scenarios, many new maps, much more customization, and the new "Challenges", inspired by Quake 3 Arena's substitute for a true single player campaign. On top of all of this, it provides a progression system for the player, keeping track of all kinds of data recording what the player's file has done. These player files (and custom game settings) can be saved independently of the main save file and stored on a N64 memory card to make it easy to take progress over to a friend's house.
The scenarios available include standard combat, where players compete for the highest kill count. This, and all other modes, can be configured either as a free for all or team based modes (with up to eight teams). There's also Capture the Case, a capture the flag stand-in that's straightforward enough just spy themed. The case is a little harder to spot though. The player holding the case can't be spotted with it and thus has to be picked out on the mini-map indicator, if it's enabled. Hold the Briefcase is a variation of this. Whoever is holding the briefcase gains points the longer they hold it. Unlike similar modes in other games, you are free to fire back at enemies while holding the case. Pop-A-Cap, aside from having a very cringeworthy 90's "white guys trying to sound street tough" name, is essentially a twist on the previous mode. Instead of holding a case, the game randomly selects someone to be "it", and all other players have to kill whoever's "it". Whoever is "it" simply has to stay alive to gain points, and whoever kills them becomes the new target. Hacker Central is... well it depends on how many players are on each team. When played with teams of 1, the game is a slog. One player has to first collect a hacking tool, then stand in front of a hacking terminal, unable to defend themselves, until the hacking tool completes. With just one player per team, this is dull and only ends when everyone gives up on just being killed and no one getting any points. However, the game becomes a lot more interesting with team sizes of two or more, where players can actually form some sort of strategy to defend the hacker. Lastly, there's King of the Hill. Unlike many implementations, instead of putting a circle down of a fixed size marking the hill location, Perfect Dark instead alters the wall texture color to indicate a whole sector or room as "the hill". This means it can be an incredibly large area such as the bottom floor of an open arena, or as small as a tiny square a team has to pack into that's at the corner of two hallways and visible through windows in another. A rule can be set on whether the hill moves after every point, or stays at a fixed location.
Most weapons, save for gadgets, the Goldeneye weapons, and the psychosis gun in particular, are available in multiplayer. These include more balanced preset lists, or a full level of customization so the player can make their own stage loadouts. There are a whole selection of brand new arenas, and three fan favorite levels from Goldeneye, with some tweaks and enhancements. There has been much speculation as to just why Facility was renamed Felicity, but as it turns out it was simply an in-joke with the level designer, much like the cheese (the nature of this in-joke has yet to be publicly revealed). It had nothing to do with copyright issues. One thing worth noting is the shift in focus when it comes to the new level designs. While the previous levels had as much of a focus on espionage and sneaking around as the game levels they're based on, this time around most of the levels are designed as direct combat arenas first and foremost. For those who liked the sneaking, traps, and subtlety Goldeneye combat focused on, this made the newer levels feel like a step down. I think in some ways I agree, but there are a couple levels I love in the new set. First is Grid, based roughly on the "ground floor" scene in The Matrix and with enough twists and turns and unique locations to keep people guessing. The second is Fortress, which is perfectly arranged for 4 team capture the case or king of the hill. Beyond that, the Skedar level has too much unreliability with the doors to be all that fun (an issue that also plagues speedrunning the single player version), and the car park is simply far too vast, with every floor being utterly cut off from every other. So, some new levels do have some issues outside of the shift in focus, but all in all since the most popular Goldeneye levels have been brought in, it still feels like overall the mutliplayer selections have all improved.
Simulants (bots) are another new addition, based on similar popular AI controlled entities in other shooters like Quake 3 Arena at the time. These however had a lot more player accessible customization than average, and they're surprisingly capable. They can be assigned to teams the same way any player can. In total, the N64 game allows for four human players and eight simulants at once. However, playing with these numbers in large levels combined with explosive weapon loadouts can cause the game to slow to an unplayable crawl. It's better to manage the numbers a little better to maintain playability. Simulants have a number of "personalities" that can be assigned, such as "cowardsims" who only attack when their algorithm detects an advantage, or "vengesims", who seek out whoever last killed them to the exclusion of all else. The difficulty of their AI can be set from "meat", which are more or less walking targets, to "Perfect". At that level, they can turn and aim as fast as if they were using mouse controls, always run as fast as a diagonal run, and switch their objectives instantly the moment players change the situation on the map. "Dark" is a level further beyond that. At that level, if Perfect felt like the enemy was cheating, Dark removes all doubt. Dark sims can pull off perfect aim with wildly inaccurate "crowd clearing" weapons like the reaper, instantly whip around for those headshots while running perfectly fast in reverse, and often simply manifest objects into their hands when you aren't looking. So long as the mini-map is enabled, their wave function stays collapsed but if you disable it, these quantum monsters now will teleport to whatever location their AI deems appropriate so long as a player doesn't see them do it. In the setting, the combat simulator is a holographic training facility and "Dark Sims" are modelled off of advanced robots that are faster and stronger than humans, explaining some of this cheating. All in all, it's very fun to play on a team with three friends and form a defensive base against an army of perfect or dark sims just to see how long you can hold out. This has shades of modern "horde" modes when done this way.
The AI really has it's chance to shine, and frustrate, in the combat challenges. Thirty in all, completion is kept independently for 1-4 players, so full completion means going through this four times, with differing numbers of players each. Frankly, that's a bit much to ask someone to put together with their friends, so fortunately there's a glitch that can be abused to just "complete" the challenges on the higher player count without actually playing them all. Of course, I'd recommend at least playing the one player versions the intended way. These all consist of specially baked scenarios with preset enemies, allies, weapons, and objectives with occasional interesting little twists too. The difficulty is fairly low key early on, and only really starts to become challenging in the 20's upward. The last few challenges, involving numerous perfect and dark sims, border on outright unfair. A lot of luck and exploitation of AI weaknesses will be required to handle these challenges. I think at that point the challenge goes a bit too far in the unfair direction. When that much luck is required, it's not really fun. However, one key note. These challenges unlock multiplayer features from maps to weapons to scenarios to customized options. Fortunately, the very hardest ones are past that point of unlocking things, which is a small mercy. All in all, it adds yet more replay value to the game for subsequent playthroughs without stretching the game out too long.
For customization, aside from the nuanced control of rules and weapon loadouts, players can also fully adjust which music they want to play and create a custom playlist on top of that. They can also select not just a character but an outfit from any available in the game, plus a few additional bodies that didn't quite make it into the campaign. This includes mixing and matching human and alien heads and bodies. While Oddjob was notoriously short and hard to hit in Goldeneye, Maians made up for this with massive heads that made headshots far easier. However, by combining a human head with a maian body, something even harder to hit than Oddjob is born. Sadly, Skedar are not a playable option. Their animations and behavior are just too different from the stock human bodies to have worked well without a lot of custom work. The closest option to that is playing as Mr. Blonde. Incidentally, this is also what happens in Counter-op when respawning puts the counter agent into a skedar body. They simply becomes another Mr. Blonde. Oh yes, it should be noted any custom game scenarios players cook up can be saved to the memory card and brought with them as well.
With all of these features, multiplayer has been enhanced to such a degree it's hard to go back to Goldeneye. About the only thing missing would be the rest of Goldeneye's levels brought over, or a map editor, but short of that this is one of the most complete multiplayer experiences available.
--- Cheats and other bonuses ---
It's a Rare tradition! Provide plenty of cheats and make players earn them! There's a massive number available this time around, one for almost every stage! Well, that's the thing. Unlike Goldeneye, there are no par times for the bonus levels. It's a shame since there's a few cheats missing that were in Goldeneye as well. There's no fast and slow animations (but there's a universal "slo mo" cheat now), and no "enemy rockets". There's also no "turbo speed" cheat, but there is a "fast motion" option for multiplayer that no longer counts as a cheat. A few other former cheats were graduated to full options though. Paintball mode is now simply an option that can be enabled without being considered cheating, and turning off the radar is simply a multiplayer option. The Goldeneye style aiming reticle however IS considered a cheat. There's also a number of additional cheats like "Hurricane punches", for when you want to just destroy an enemy, and infinite laptop gun ammo, or even infinite ammo without reloads. What's a shame is there's room for more cheats if only so many weren't just subsets of other better cheats. There's a "perfect darkness" cheat that casts the whole world in a black filter, but doesn't actually blind the enemy. Also, the "cloaking device" cheat is essentially a weaker version of the invisibility cheat from Goldeneye.
All in all, while some of the new cheats are unique and fun additions, like the psychosis gun for turning enemies to allies, others are downgrades, and the missing par times for bonus levels means less challenges to overcome in those cases as well. The cheats are of course welcome, but it all comes down as a bit of a wash between the two. No clear winner here.
The statistics gained in multiplayer however lead to something interesting. Each statistic has hidden "milestones", and reaching a certain preset number of these milestones across all statistics causes a rank up. After a long period of grinding, the coveted rank of "Perfect: 1" is attained, along with a revealed username and password. Originally, these were meant to be used with Perfect Dark's "augmented reality" ad campaign web sites, but those sites went down earlier than expected and the codes never did get properly used. Still, it was a unique idea, even if getting to that rank involved far more grinding than it should have. (Literal days of leaving a controller with buttons or a stick taped down to run in long circles.)
-- And in the end ---
What we finally received from Rare was their last great hit. Conker's Bad Fur Day would be another great game released a year later to end out their run of N64 games (a game Nintendo refused to publish forcing Rare to do so themselves), but this was the last million seller they'd produce that made such a name for itself. It was a game that truly improved on just about everything Goldeneye offered, and while it falls short of being "perfect", it's certainly one of the greatest games of it's generation, PC or console. If only it had a good framerate and perhaps a higher resolution....
Enter the XBox 360 version. This version was commissioned and done by 4J studios using the original code provided by Rare as the base, where the unreleased Goldeneye remaster was done directly by Rare themselves. I'll get into the numerous changes made to this edition. Note that this is for a fully patched version of the game. The patch fixed issues involving the timing of explosions and the laptop gun as well as adding extra control options. Of course, the game now mostly runs at a smooth 60FPS. Oddly, explosions still cause the game to stutter a bit, and massive chains of them can still make the frame rate crawl, but not nearly to the extent of the original. Beyond that, the gameplay is identical to the N64 original. Even most of the glitches and exploits for speedrunning are still intact. The only one of note that I honestly think shouldn't have been "fixed" is that now the devastator can no longer be used to blow up Carrington's files "before" Carrington orders you to do so, making that particular time trial much less flexible than before. Controls, with a little prodding, are also mostly improved and now work just like most modern duel stick FPS controls. Sadly this makes diagonal running MUCH trickier. I wish they'd allowed the d-pad (bad as the 360 dpad is) to be used for movement, but alas that's not the case. Instead, you must find JUST the right angle to get that diagonal run boost, and it's not even doable on every 360 pad. Of all the pads I own myself, only one actually is calibrated JUST right to allow for it, and unfortunately 360 gamepads can't be manually calibrated in any way. The game does allow for some minor buttons reassignment, to make buttons for reloading and the like match one of three popular franchises. I picked the "Duty Calls" one myself. Crouching is now assigned to it's own independent button! This is great in many ways, but there's no longer any "quick" way to go from fully standing to fully crouched. This also means the "secondary" mode for the sniper rifle was simply removed. There was simply no point in it even being there when zooming and crouching no longer overlap.
Textures and models have been updated across the board. They don't make the game look like Halo Reach or anything, but they make the game look sharper, like what it MIGHT have looked like as an early Gamecube title. Whether this is an improvement is a matter of opinion. Maians now look like wrinkly old naked people instead of silvery smooth cute buddies, and so I'd say that was a notable downgrade. Other changes are also hit or miss. Sometimes the "interpretations" change enough details that an object will look entirely different, and other times it'll look simply like an enhanced version as intended. Their interpretation of Maian tech shifts from "liquid metal" to "aquatic lifeform" for example. Of note is that many of the heads based on old employees from both Rare and Nintendo have been replaced with the then current staff of Rare, 4J, and Microsoft. While it's a shame that Miyamoto is no longer guarding the Pelagic II in a Fire Mario suit (because he's got real firepower, see), at the very least now we have Peter Molyneux as the new elevator guard at dataDyne. Yes that's right. MS's most fabled liar can now be punched and kicked repeatedly in the opening and closing cinematics between levels! They've also added an additional character for multiplayer, the "Agent" from Crackdown 2. That's... well it's whatever but at least they made the model intentionally undetailed to more closely resemble the N64ish look of the rest of the game. The four cheats that previously had an alternative unlock if you plugged in the Gameboy Color Perfect Dark with a transfer pack now unlock if the game detects a save from Perfect Dark Zero on your console.
Audio has also been enhanced in many ways, and this one is a more objective enhancement. Voice and sound effects generally play at a higher bitrate based on the original samples, and music was remastered using the original instrument samples as well. Some of the songs, however, sound rather different in their recomposition, and thus are open to interpretation.
There's been a few tweaks as well. Times now display to greater precision showing the milliseconds as well, but the Perfect Dark speed running community never really "took" to this version. Still, it's an appreciated detail. Further, the Goldeneye weapons are now fully selectable in multiplayer, and in fact all multiplayer options are selectable right from the start instead of requiring unlocking through challenges. Difference species heads can no longer be mixed together in this version without a special cheat. Hold down "RB" while switching from head to body and now they can be mixed, but the reason this was normally prevented reveals itself. The new models don't "mesh" right and now gaps show between head and body when the species don't match.
The two big gameplay changes this time around are in online modes and the new "Awards" system. Mutliplayer is as fully featured as 360 games were expected to be at the time. Full support for "parties", leaderboards, matchmaking, access to your friend's list, and so on. That's where "Awards" come in. These are similar to the game's achievements, but they go a step beyond. The list of achievements is mostly just an incomplete list of things you do to get 100% completion in the game anyway, plus minor stuff like killing an enemy with each weapon and just destroying Carrington's entire wine collection. However, one is locked behind getting all the awards, and that's only doable so long as 360 online support remains operational.
While achievements are progress stored both locally and online, "Awards" are stored solely online and saved to an ongoing profile for player's Perfect Dark progress. It's an extension of the game's leaderboard system, in fact, though it was almost never used after MS introduced it. In one way, this is frustrating. Once MS's 360 services go dark, there will be no way to attain progress in these rewards. I'd rather they have been part of the typical achievement system. Secondly, there is no clear indication of what the award even wants you to do. You're given an icon and a silly little quip and the rest is up to you to just guess at. The community has come through here, breaking the code and figuring out the objectives (with a little uncertainty on some specifics here and there) for each of these rewards. Their implementation may have been left wanting, but what they add is a whole new collection of unique challenges throughout the game. There's some multiplayer focused ones, the hardest of which is gaining every "medal" possible. Like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark awards silly little medals based on playstyle after a game. Things like "most shielded" or "most cowardly". Getting all of them nets you this reward. The majority of awards are additional challenges for the game proper. Each one must be done on a particular difficulty level for a particular level. One involves completing Carringon's Villa while getting scopeless headshots on 8 enemies, for example. Of these awards, three were particularly challenging, and not just to do but to figure out. Three must be done in co-op. That's not to say all three actually require a friend's help to accomplish, but that all three must literally be done while in the co-op mode or even if you do meet the objective, it won't count. No, not even with an AI buddy. It must be done with a second player, full stop. Of these three, technically two don't actually need someone to help you. One can be done completely solo (beating the G5 Streets level in under 35 seconds), and the other can be done with you switching back and forth between two controllers (on Air Force One, accomplish objective 2 BEFORE objective 1 and then finish the level all within a certain time, which can be done by having player 2 just stand in the right spot until a cutscene starts, immediately tossing a timed mine, then switching back to player one and skedaddling right the heck outta there. The last of these is the only one that truly can't be done without another person at the controls, and that's completing the first and second objectives in under a minute at the Carrington Institute, then finishing the rest of the level in whatever time but without using the RCP-120's cloaking feature once. If you want to know why this review took so much longer after my Goldeneye one, THIS is the reason. I had to convince a friend to take the time to grind out this particular accomplishment. In all fairness, once I did, it was actually pretty enjoyable. Neither of us got frustrated because we went in knowing it would involve many restarts, and unlike me this friend hadn't played Perfect Dark in a good long while so at first there was a lot of relearning involved, but eventually we got it done. It's just that the stars had to align to make this something this friend actually wanted to do. That, and the game takes longer to 100% than Goldeneye does, since there's so much more to do. Once this and all the other awards were finally attained, I sat on top of a 201% completion rating according to the leaderboard and could finally weigh in on all this. Let me just get this out of the way. I don't think there should be multiplayer dependent awards, in the same way I don't think co-op should have par times for cheats exclusive to it. It makes it all the harder for anyone to ever actually complete the game, and not in a fun way, save having someone else who actually cares about a 23 year old game enough to play a 13 year old remaster of it with you. All in all though, it did add a lot of new experiences and challenges to the old game, and that much I do appreciate. The awards? No new cheats I'm afraid, just a few "gamer icons", some avatar accessories, and a new theme.
All in all, the 360 release comes out as the ideal way to experience the game, for now. It's just a shame there's no "quick button" to revert back to the visuals and sound of the N64 release like Halo or Monkey Island's remakes did, and again the diagonal running aspect is far too tricky to pull off. Just a few changes, which at this point are unlikely to ever happen, would make this one truly perfect. Also, still no map editor outside of the modding community. But, it's easy enough to get this version on even the newest XBox consoles and for cheap.
This also resulted in one of the longest threads here at Tendo City. The anticipation for Perfect Dark was met with delay after delay, while all these troubles and oddities behind the scenes were hidden from public view. Fortunately, when the game finally came out (a year after the release of the Dreamcast and the start of the next generation of consoles beyond the N64), all those delays and additional work turned out to be worth it. However, the question that comes up is this. Should the game have been delayed into a Gamecube launch title, like both Star Fox Adventures and Eternal Darkness? Were the performance hits taken by pushing the N64 harder than it had been up until that point worth the, at the time, amazing visuals? The good news is, we have the best of both worlds now. The game has been ported to the XBox 360 since then, with smooth 60FPS gameplay and enhanced textures and models. I'll be focusing most of my review on the N64 original, but I'll have a section at the end regarding the 360 version afterwards. It's that second version that's delayed this review for so long, what with it's added "Award" challenges and new 201% completion rating challenge. With all that said, let's get started on what is often considered to be Goldeneye's superior and see if it lives up to that reputation.
--- Story ---
It's the year 2023. The world belongs to a consolidated collection of mega corporations who's inventions revolutionize both civilian and military activity. Global conflicts now focus on information. Megacorps are developing advanced AI who's morality is questionable. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is vast. The U.S. President appears to be a tool of the corporate class and even agents controlling the NSA seem to have heavy ties to them. Pollution, war, and the steady effects of climate change still run amok. In the midst of all of this, rumors of unidentified flying objects and even deeper secrets the governments seem to have witnessed have recently resurfaced thanks to odd videos.
Anyway, enough talking about the news, let's get onto the game's story. Why yes, I DID rush through both Goldeneye and Perfect Dark's modern ports in this specific year JUST to make that joke in this review, but it is stunning just how well this absolutely ridiculous game's initial story lines up with the actual year 2023. As to the rest, yes the story is ridiculous video gamey tropes. The original concept was inspired by a combination of James Bond, X-Files, and Cyberpunk. They had the idea to make the lead character a woman right from the start. They simply thought it was about time they had a female lead in one of their games and worked around that. "Wokeness" has always existed, and we're richer for it. There are conflicting reports on where the name came from. Originally some developers said Joanna Dark was supposed to sound like Joan of Arc, but a few years back another developer revealed that this was just a happy coincidence they later capitalized on. The name for the character stemmed from the game's name, and the game's name was simply mashing together a bunch of cool sounding words until they found something they all liked the sound of. In any event, what we get is a complicated setting involving two megacorps at war with each other, each secretly allied with one of two alien groups competing to reach a hidden ancient weapon on the sea floor. It's themes are largely incidental to the setting they wanted to play with. The whole thing is pretty self aware with Joanna's own reactions to how much stranger and stranger events get playing a bit of comic relief. Unlike Goldeneye, which had a movie to fall back on if players wanted some more backstory, Perfect Dark had to expand it's cut scenes to develop things a bit more. The cut scenes were fully voiced, but the developers still had to keep them short both to avoid losing player interest and to conserve limited ROM space. They opted to have almost every line of dialog simply push the plot forward. There's almost nothing to really latch onto for character exploration here, but fortunately there are a few interesting moments. For my part, I love the moment Cassandra reveals just what kind of person she is simply by revealing she is willing to sacrifice her own life to save one of her enemies if it means getting revenge on the group that betrayed her. For the rest, you get a selection of cliché characters with not all that much depth to them, but they play the roles well and they're fun enough. Elvis in particular is a rather adorable alien buddy that's generally enjoyable every time he's in a scene. By the end of all this, Joanna manages to single handedly slay the leader of an alien empire and allow her ally aliens to bombard the capital, saving the sector. Typical stuff. The game does do it's best to try and hide a lot of the story twists and turns, but the ad campaign more or less spoiled a lot of it before the game had even come out. Elvis' head is right there on the box and numerous promotional materials make it very clear this will eventually involve aliens. All in all, the story is the bare essentials, but I'd say it's more interesting to follow along than Goldeneye's if only for the creative mashup of genres. Like Goldeneye, it's enough to keep you following along to see where it goes next, and nothing more.
--- Visuals ---
A few years had passed since Goldeneye had introduced mocap to FPS games and the genre on PC had expanded by leaps and bounds since then. The likes of Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, and System Shock 2 had released the previous year. Further, a competitive to the "female lead secret spy shooter" space would release only a few months after Perfect Dark with No One Lives Forever, and Free Radical's own first Time Crisis came out around the same time as that, so Perfect Dark was racing against it's own subgenre, just barely beating those two to market. Visually, it couldn't compete in a lot of ways with any of those titles, limited by the N64 hardware as it was when the Dreamcast was already out and the PS2 was right around the corner. However, it still managed to introduce effects not yet seen in other shooters of the time. It managed to simulate real time lighting effects throughout levels based on destroying light sources by creating multiple light maps per level and using that to base what is and isn't lit up. Further, blood effects were expanded to stain surroundings, though in a limited way compared to what later games would do, and the game layered on numerous trippy visual effects in many of the special weapon modes, such as fisheye stretching when using a Slayer rocket or after images when punch-drunk by fists or a neutron bomb. It did all this while greatly expanding the size of various levels compared to what they were in Goldeneye. While Unreal was still champion of raw visual fidelity at this point, Perfect Dark still managed to do JUST enough to catch interest at the time.
However, this came at a cost. The N64 simply didn't have enough memory to handle all this AND all the large levels in the game at once. The game required the recently released "Expansion Pak", which plugged into a slot on the top of the console and doubled it's memory. This was advertised as making the system "run faster", but this isn't accurate. All it provided was additional memory but the system ran just as fast as it had before. Some games could use this extra memory to store higher resolution textures and thus perform at higher resolutions, but the clock speed was unchanged. In fact, running at that higher resolution would often slow games down more than they already were, and thus it was often recommended to either disable the high res mode or simply swap back to the jumper cart to force the game to play at the lower resolution in order to boost performance. In the case of Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64, and Majora's Mask, the memory requirements of the games' designs required more memory to run at all. Perfect Dark in particular did have a high resolution mode, but it's hit on performance is bad enough that turning it off is one of the recommended options to make the game "playable". Fortunately, Rare's developers seemed to realize this and so it is already off by default. Further, technically the game is "playable" without the expansion pack, but most of the game modes have been disabled, including single player, and limiting multiplayer to some smaller levels in two-player only.
This brings us to what it runs like in this ideal state, expansion pak inserted and low res enabled. Frankly, it isn't good. Goldeneye was bad, Perfect Dark is worse. Is it that far from Goldeneye? No, I'd say it's only a few frames difference. However, when the two games are running in the teens to begin with, a few frames can feel a lot more significant. At it's worst, the game dips below 10 FPS, and if you do something as foolish as to set up chain reaction remote mines and gaze into the explosive chain reaction, the game will crawl at handful of frames a second. Fortunately, that latter example is something someone would have to intentionally set up and it's the sort of thing that could be done in Goldeneye as well. (In fact, in the XBox 360 remaster, chain reaction explosions even cause that game to slow down. I suspect that explosions weren't coded particularly well in these games.) Here's the good news. Much like Goldeneye, the programmers were especially careful about how the game handled slowdown, so key frames are prioritized making sure that what does get animated are either the results of player action or the result of enemy action if at all possible. This makes the game feel far more responsive than it otherwise would without that optimization, even at the low frame rate, and thus brings it back into being playable and allowing for accurate movement, aim, and actions taking place without delay.
The art design leans further towards sci-fi and a slightly more stylized look than Goldeneye did. While faces still use photos skinned onto the models, they now use more bright and almost comic-book colors, and the characters are equally bright and bold with clear silhouettes. While the art still veers towards the realistic side thus preventing the visuals from aging very well even one generation on, they fair better than Goldeneye's strictly "movie realistic" aesthetic does. It was a needed change to allow the humans of this world to fit in better with the aliens and alien environments in the latter half of the game though. Otherwise, Elvis or Mr. Blonde would have stood out horribly. Along with that art are two very distinct visual styles for the two alien races in the game. Elvis comes from standard Grey aliens from American folklore, called the Maians in this setting. Their bodies are sleek smooth silver without visible mouths and their weapons are equally inscrutable, literally melting their ammunition into themselves to reload. The Skedar by contrast are tall imposing dinosaur-like monsters full of jagged angles and hard edges in green, only to ultimately be revealed to be pretending to that kind of strength and actually being tiny little snakelike entities that use bio-armor to wage war. Their weapons feel like a mix of high tech and barbarism, reloading in a more traditional way yet using everything from destructive energy to literal screaming explosives. Humans have the most recognizable weapons, but being set in a cyberpunk future and working for a secret organization, they have a distinct flavor. One is a laptop that transforms into a gun, another is a rather rectangular pistol that still manages to look sleep. The mines even have an odd glow to them. You know... future glow. Oh yes, and the shields. They resemble the blocky shields from David Lynch's Dune movie, only colorized to indicate how much charge remains.
Environments stay interesting enough to look distinct throughout. Every building seems to have it's own aesthetic. Area 51 has stretched out hexagonal tunnels that are medical-bay-white (and with pointless caution stripes all over the place instead of just at the point of danger, but that's a typical cliché that can be forgiven). The G5 building has numerous very tight corridors built into stone. Carrington's villa is an island paradise resort of sorts. The Cetan superweapon is a bioship that's alive with green living walls and biological turrets in the ceiling. The Skedar homeworld is a holy place yet the very capital already looks run down with broken pillars and malfunctioning doors, as though the Skedar themselves did far more damage to their world before you even discovered it. The downtown area is every cyberpunk dystopia, eternally raining and full of flying cars, dangerous security robots, and agents trying to keep everything in order. There's also a frozen expanse in Alaska, the inside of the plane Air Force One, the luxury office of dataDyne, and the clean professional Carrington Institute, to name a few more. This keeps the game feeling fresh and prevents the areas from getting too stale, save for when a level is reused, which happens more often here than in Goldeneye, but I'll get into that later.
--- Sound ---
The game's sound design is excellent, as it was with Goldeneye but enhanced even further. Unique sounds for running on various surfaces, panting, random bits of often hilarious commentary from enemies, solid punchy weapon sound effects, reload sounds ranging from simply satisfying to outright surreal, and all the numerous ambiance layered throughout each level. It all comes through as rich as the visuals do, and unlike said visuals, the sounds still hold up. When the music is "calm", take a listen. City streets are bustling with the sounds of distant events going on in roads just out of sight. Buildings have running ventilation and computers beeping in the background. Alien ships and worlds have strange unrecognizable yet consistent sounds throughout. Even Carrington's Villa has a sea breeze and the occasional sound of waves when outside. The music is a microcosm of the game's own development. Grant Kirkhope returned to take over composing duties after Graeme Norgate left for Free Radical, yet both had worked together on Goldeneye's soundtrack. Other artists also contributed, but these two, while not exactly working as collaboratively as they had on Goldeneye, still managed an absolutely stunning and addictive soundtrack. Aside from some obvious inspiration from Bond that had to stay a lot further away from that franchise this time around, they implemented numerous more "surreal" instrumentation inspired by the theme of the X-Files, and also implemented heavy "synth" inspired by movies like Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. The mixture of all these flavors came together to make a soundtrack that's a joy to listen to even without playing the game, like many Rare soundtracks. Much like Goldeneye, the game used queues to switch up songs midlevel to emphasize the situation. Sneaking uses much more subdued calmer music with that nervous edge. Combat switched to much more action packed music. Full alert emergencies ramp it up to a panic. Multiplayer also makes use of a lot of this music, and further allows players to select which music they want to play and even create a playlist. If you don't like a song, it can be stricken off entirely, though generally I simply stick with "random" myself.
I suppose it would be enough to summarize this as "Rare did Rare quality work" here. The sounds pop, the music's catchy and sets the right mood.
--- Controls ---
The game's controls are taken straight from Goldeneye, and like Goldeneye the ideal control setup is 1.2, which is more or less a "southpaw" version of the standard modern twin stick controls, replacing the right stick with the four C buttons. The game now has a number of interesting tweaks on top of this. Firstly, "head wobble" can now be disabled. This makes aiming far easier especially when running or sniping. My first time through the game I insisted on playing with this turned "on", but frankly I was making things harder on myself for no good reason. All it does is implement a random wobble players must contend with, so disabling it leaves it purely up to player skill. Plus, for those who really want to go for speed running, they'll want this off to better their chances. The game now has a cursor outside of "precise aiming" mode, so even while moving one can see exactly where they're going to shoot without resorting to putting sticky tack on the screen. The cursor itself is also much more subtle. It's smaller, semitransparent, and has a bit of a "range finding" aspect along the sides to really give a good impression of where the shot's coming from and where it's going, in case the player has a bad case of cotton eye. Corner leaning works just as it did before, and now ducking has a bit more nuance. In Goldeneye, being able to run while crouching was more of an accidental blessing that required very particular timing to pull off. In Perfect Dark, they took that and made it intentional design. Not only can players now move while crouched, there are now two levels of crouching, allowing a range of movement/profile tradeoffs. Using that particularly well timed button combination from Goldeneye now quick-ducks from fully standing to fully crouched, to save time.
Then there's the "quick menu". This feature is becoming standard in games these days, but Perfect Dark was the pioneer. By holding down the weapon switch button, a circular "quick menu" comes up. Point the analog stick in the direction of the item one wants to use and the game will switch right to it. This is much faster than manually switching most of the time, and also keeps players "in the action" better than pausing and manually selecting equipment (though the latter is still possible and very important for speed runs). If player inventory passes a certain point, pressing the trigger while in this menu switches to a second, and a third. Commands to A.I. allies take up the last "page" of this quick menu.
Once again, the fastest way to move involves diagonal running at JUST the right angle, which is easily done using the c-buttons in the 1.2 control scheme. I've noticed that the most popular shooters to speed run are the ones that involve skillful running tricks. There's something satisfying about utilizing some hidden method to get the best speed. Doom has wall-running. Quake has bunny hopping. GE/PD has diagonal running. All of them require a certain level of skill to utilize properly and mitigate movement commitments. In Goldeneye, the diagonal run was an unintended glitch, but in Perfect Dark they've specially calibrated the par times around the expectation of it's use. They didn't bother to fix the glitch and instead seem to fully endorse it now. It's such a wonderful thing when developers embrace techniques that add to the replayability of a game rather than clamp down on them.
All in all, the controls have been tightened and expanded but the general physics still feel very much like Goldeneye. For those who played the former, they'll feel right at home and then some here.
--- Game Design ---
Here's the crux of it! First, let me recap what I said in my Goldeneye review. That game created a new subgenre of FPS that emphasized exploration through numerous paths to discover solutions to unique objectives for each mission, very often allowing unique solutions so long as the core objective flag was triggered. It also heavily emphasized sneaking, though not to the extent of true "tactical espionage action" games like Metal Gear or Thief, which had already come out by this point. Further, with games like System Shock 2 out, there were now games that competed and even surpassed in terms of world interactivity while still providing solid shooting mechanics. However, Perfect Dark wasn't ready to just rest on what made Goldeneye's level design work so well. It expanded. Now the game wouldn't just add new objectives on higher difficulties. It would alter them entirely or shift locations of key items or enemies around based on the difficulty. Where Goldeneye made things more interesting and deeper with each new playthrough on a higher difficulty, Perfect Dark made each difficulty feel like a different path through the game. It wasn't incredibly rich or deep. Only some levels even did that, but the ones that did really stuck out. Further, numerous choices made in previous levels would affect later levels down the line. It becomes a good strategy at times to replay a level and pick a different option to make a later level's status shift a little. This sort of thing truly made player agency matter in a way Goldeneye didn't quite have. As examples, in Carrington's Villa, on lower difficulty, you are tasked with saving a negotiator as a sniper secretly inserted on a nearby hill. On the highest difficulty, you ARE the "negotiator", and you have to fight your way out of the situation yourself. In Area 51, during the escape, depending on the difficulty you may find Jo's brother Jonathan early on, or have to search deeper into the base to locate him. In that same level, near the end, Jonathan says he'll open the gates to allow you and Elvis to escape while he escapes on a jetbike. If you intercept him instead and stand in front of him, Jo will say she'll do that and Jonathan will escape instead. If you do this, later on Jonathan will still be alive to aid you when the institute gets invaded. The most significant change based purely on difficulty is the Cetan ship itself. The level consists of reaching numerous sections via teleporters, and depending on difficulty, the "middle" section is a completely different layout in each difficulty. Numerous little changes, and consequences to choices, are littered here and there throughout the game and it all adds up to make the game a richer experience that's a lot more interesting to play multiple times.
The levels themselves are still filled with numerous interactable objects, only this time with a wider range of effects which does make sense considering the sci-fi setting. There's computers that can be found that open hidden compartments or paths through levels (revealing secret weapons or just a shortcut to take certain enemies by surprise), windows that can be opened, and oh so very many pretty shiny buttons. The spy tools are the same kind of eclectic bunch to be found in Goldeneye, with the added bonus that more of them are optional this time around. For example, there is a level where you need to hack a taxi to create a distraction by remotely crashing it into a security bot. Except.. you don't need to do that. There's a remote drone hidden somewhere in the level and it can be fit with a bomb and asploded to create a distraction another way. In this same level, guards can be lured out to open certain locked shutters to give you more hiding places, including an entrance to a um... gentleman's club underground. As for the level's layouts, just like Goldeneye they're often filled with numerous paths and often useless side areas simply to give the area a more "lived in" feel, as though it's a real place. This also adds to routing options or simply hiding places over time. Certain level "equivalents" may be noted by Goldeneye players. The Alaskan wilderness "crash site" is much like the "Surface" levels, save that there's a whole underground section and mountains cut the aboveground region into sections. However, one thing can't be compared. Goldeneye had lots of "remnants" of it's early design as an on-rails shooter, where Perfect Dark was never intended for that. So, there are far fewer sections that look like they came out of Time Crisis here, and nothing like the "Train" level. One other thing worth noting is the player can "fall off" far more places than in Goldeneye. While some invisible fences still exist, for the most part the player is free to jump from higher levels to lower if there's no visible obstruction.
I should mention the cheese! During development, one of the designers commented to the map creator that something he'd made looked like a wedge of cheese. He decided to turn this into a running gag and put an intentional piece of cheese into every map in the game. Finding them all is yet another secret to explore, although there's no in-game tracking for it so it's just for your own satisfaction.
There is one downside to these levels with all their richness, and that's how many get reused. I'm not going to count cases like how the external of Area 51 and the internal are technically all one big map, because in practice you can't actually get to one section when playing the other so they effectively play out as two very distinct levels. I AM going to count that the "inside" section is done twice, once going in the other going out. The same goes for the main building section of dataDyne, and in fact the bonus levels unlocked at higher difficulties are also all reused levels. Not counting the bonus levels, the game only reuses as many as Goldeneye did, but counting those? Not a single bonus level is a unique location. There's four of them, but one's basically a mini-game that can be disregarded for this, leaving three. The game is one level shy of Goldeneye's count after that, and again, the bonus levels are reused. Don't misunderstand. They are reused in clever ways that make for unique strategy, but it's still lacking in comparison. All in all though, having replayed the Goldeneye and Perfect Dark levels so many times these past few months, I love them all, but Perfect Dark's level design (mostly) edges out what came before.
One last point to mention. Unlike Goldeneye, this game has a hub level called the Carrington Institute. This is a place to "relax" and calm down between tense missions. All the NPCs have some cute things to say. There's computers that add in details on current progress in the story, character bios, equipment information, and a few training facilities on top of that. The um.... "simulation room" (that looks like a holodeck straight from The Next Generation) creates holograms simulating things like navigating security lasers or locating switches. The gadget room has a hidden training hall teaching you how to use the gadgets. The massive storage rooms have hovering crates and a hoverbike you can play around with. (Here's a hint. Yes you can actually ride the hover bike. You have to press the interact button twice to get on or off. I didn't know this for an embarrassingly long time because it isn't actually documented anywhere in or out of the game in the manual.) Oh and yes, here's one you'll spend the most time with. The armory has a shooting range and you unlock more challenges in it by unlocking more weapons throughout the game (by finding and picking it up at least once in a level then finishing it, both in the campaign or in combat challenges). They range from bronze to gold and are all tailor made specifically for each weapon. Some can be very challenging, especially the ones that involve tossing explosives, but they can be rewarding when you find the unique tricks for tackling each of them. For the most part, these help you learn the full ins and outs of each weapon, but some of the training levels are a little "weak" in this regard. All in all, the institute is a wonderful addition, and if you think it's vast design is a bit overkill for what's actually there... well you're not wrong. Wait for it. No level design goes wasted in Perfect Dark.
Unfortunately, unlike the later Time Splitters series, there is no map editor. While Time Splitters would eventually have map editors so powerful they allowed for fully functional campaign levels with objectives to be set up, Perfect Dark is limited to the levels included. Recently, modders have set about fixing this with new map editing available to the retro game, but this was not available at the time of the game's release. This sets it, and Goldeneye, behind the likes of Quake and Doom which had custom level design built in right from the start.
Now we come to the enemy design. Let's get this out of the way. You can't shoot hats off guards any more. Apparently this was a result of changes that allowed different head sizes among guards, including alien heads of course, which made the hats no longer sit "right" on different heads, so they just baked the hats right into different head models. Maybe an extra week of development could have resolved that, but they decided to focus on other things. What did they focus on? Everything else. Now you can shoot guns out of a guard's hands, or even just walk up and disarm them. They may surrender if they are alone or hurt or otherwise weighted towards their "fear" factor, or they may decide to run away, or fight back. If they fight back, being close to them is a bad idea. They can melee you too, including knocking your weapons out of your hand, or they could reach down and pick a gun up off the ground, or they may have a gun or two or twenty stashed away in their clothes. All around, AI has been improved dramatically since the last game. In fact, while pathfinding has never been their strong suit, their general behaviors for handling what you may throw at them are beyond what's put in a lot of today's tube-quest cinematic shooters. Trying to lure an enemy chasing you around a corner so you can blow them away the moment they pass through the door? They may just hold back and try to lure you out instead. They may know you're a floor above and chuck an n-bomb at you to hit with the AOE. They may run and group up with more to rush back to you. They may... be able to see you over railings and fire back over them! You can no longer rely on rushing at a guard and ducking to karate chop their knees to death. Their new melee options allow them to handle that. Other than this, familiar weaknesses remain. Enemies pulling out their weapon have little room to adjust their aim if you decide to dash behind them before firing, leaving them wide open. Their animations usually need to fully complete as well. Of course, the "slowly walking forward while holding down the trigger on an automatic" animation remains, and it's as deadly as ever if you can't get behind them before it starts, so find cover instead. Of course, it's worth mentioning the aliens and their AI. The maians are basically a race of oddjobs with big heads, so their AI has all the same strengths and weaknesses. By comparison, we have the Skedar. Their AI is... much more simplistic, and since the last few levels feature them almost exclusively, it leads to them being a bit of a disappointment. They either rush straight at you or plant their feet and just fire away. No clever flanking or strategies of any kind, because they're built to be brutal almost like wild animals. They're still dangerous though at least, just not as well... interesting as the earlier human enemies.
Perfect Dark's legacy certainly can't ignore it's unique weaponry. In keeping with Perfect Dark's "throw everything at the wall" development hurricane, the weapons are a huge collection of very unique concepts with no regard paid towards balance, and I like it that way. This game uses a "secondary fire" concept that many games use today, but in this case the secondary fire modes are usually very different from primary modes. They range from incredible to practically useless to ways to make up for controller limitations. Punching has a secondary disarm mode, which is one of the most useful capabilities in the game. Pistols have a secondary smack mode, which is probably the least useful save for being able to quickly knock out someone you're holding up with a gun. I'll go ahead and mention all the faves everyone does as well. The laptop gun converts into a throwable automated turret. The Cyclone allows firing an entire clip in the space of two seconds. The CMP-150 has a "Fifth Element" secondary where you can pass the cursor over up to five enemies, and the weapon auto-aims towards them each in turn until they are dead. The Callisto NTG switches to a slower firing high impact mode that goes through doors, thin walls, and rows of enemies. The Slayer fires a screaming explosion that can be remote controlled. The wrist mounted laser switches between Moonraker and "cutting beam", combining the two items from Goldeneye. The Dragon allows you to throw the weapon down as a proximity mine, which is especially cruel a trick in multiplayer. The sniper rifle's secondary is... crouching. Yes, you can crouch in the game anyway, but the way the controls are set up, the zoom function of the sniper rifle is mapped to the same buttons as crouching, so they had to just use the secondary for that. It's a shame.
All in all though, these secondary features result in many new approaches to levels and their challenges. Many can be treated as additional gadgets allowing playthroughs to become far more varied. The laptop gun can be tossed in a heavily guarded room to clear it out, or simply to defend you while you hack a console. The Remote control rocket can be used to take out a distant important target from safety, or simply to speed up progress through the level. It's these that truly make playing with all these unique levels fun. While the weapons are NOT balanced taken as a whole, their deployment in each level is. Like Goldeneye, you can't carry weaponry from one level to the next and start with fixed loadouts, dependent on POS (Procure on Site) to better equip yourself in each stage. This can feel a little silly at times when a stage literally takes place right on the other side of a door you finish the last level going through, but it means that the challenges can be tailored very specifically to the tasks at hand. Multiplayer likewise uses specially configured loadouts that are roughly balanced in power, but it does allow you to completely ignore this and make custom weapon loadouts instead. Both of these things are critical, because there exists the Farsight. This is generally considered the most overpowered weapon in gaming for a reason. It's an alien railgun with an X-Ray scope and AI target finding. You can sit in some secluded corner of a level and just snipe everything through any number of walls, and the hit is an instant kill on contact. Well, if the target has shields the first shot destroys the shields, and the second is an instant kill. It also fires very slowly, and aiming through the scope means you have no situational awareness. These are the very few advantages opponents have when facing this gun. Limiting it to a very small number of levels prevents it from utterly breaking the game, but oh how much fun it is when you finally do get it.
Classic Goldeneye weapons do exist in the game, but only as cheat codes and they can't be used in multiplayer unfortunately. Instead, they're only for later playthrough. These weapons are unlocked by completing shooting range challenges back at the Institute, as mentioned earlier.
--- Multiplayer ---
In Goldeneye, the multiplayer mode was a last minute addition by one developer that turned into the game's most popular mode. It's no wonder then that Perfect Dark would put a big focus on greatly expanding and focusing on the multiplayer right from the start. Fortunately, this didn't come at the expense of the single player campaign. Instead, it enhanced it.
Co-op mode was added, thanks to the popularity of this mode in Doom and Quake. This addition involved certain tweaks to the level design to keep the game challenging with the extra character joining. In this case, that extra character is (usually) Velvet Dark, a sort of "Luigi" style sibling to Joanna which the story fails to acknowledge. In fact, the co-op character can even be bot controlled complete with some basic player-input commands. Co-op drastically improves the appeal of the single player campaign, so long as those playing it are willing to handle the rapid "quit and restarts" that failing objectives in a game like this brings. Co-op also has it's own saved progression, so a full completion requires doing this mode as well. In a few cases, the AI will actually get in the way (such as Mr. Blonde's Revenge) so it's probably more ideal in those cases to have a human player or even just to select a human ally and then just leave player 2's controller alone. Some levels change enemy spawn locations, numbers, or health/shield levels. Others shift a few objective locations slightly, others make the two players spawn far apart, and some even alter how certain cut scene triggers work. (The escape from dataDyne has a section where you automatically walk through a gate, but in co-op this automated walk is disabled so that whatever player didn't go through isn't locked in place when it happens.) A lot of care was put into it, and it's appreciated even if they didn't bother adding par times for cheats to this mode. It should be noted that as for playing with an AI controlled companion, a few alternate companions with their own AI can be unlocked. However, they are treated as "cheats" and thus can't be used to gain progression.
Counter-op is a brand new concept involving having player 1 play through a stage solo, while player 2 hops from body to body like a Matrix Agent, using their death (including by using a suicide pill) to springboard into a random other NPC's body. The counter agent's objective is to cause a failed mission for player 1. This can include pushing things in front of doors, setting up traps if they have the right weapon for it, or simply helping to alert guards. However, the counter agent can't destroy mission critical objects. In practice, the mode is weighted very heavily in favor of the main player. Not only does the counter agent have very low health and are unable to carry inventory with them, they will often be forced to spawn in a body very far from the player. Killing themselves or other enemies in order to get ammo or spawn closer is also very counter productive as it can make even Perfect Agent difficulty a cakewalk. It's a creative mode, but unfortunately it ends up not being all that fun to be a counter agent chasing and failing to make even a dent in an experienced player's progress. This mode doesn't track progress in the N64 original and isn't counted towards completion. This makes sense, since it's pretty easy to "suicide cheat" your way through every mission at every difficulty.
Combat Simulator is the real star of the show. This is the multiplayer competitive component from Goldeneye, vastly amped up. This mode includes new scenarios, many new maps, much more customization, and the new "Challenges", inspired by Quake 3 Arena's substitute for a true single player campaign. On top of all of this, it provides a progression system for the player, keeping track of all kinds of data recording what the player's file has done. These player files (and custom game settings) can be saved independently of the main save file and stored on a N64 memory card to make it easy to take progress over to a friend's house.
The scenarios available include standard combat, where players compete for the highest kill count. This, and all other modes, can be configured either as a free for all or team based modes (with up to eight teams). There's also Capture the Case, a capture the flag stand-in that's straightforward enough just spy themed. The case is a little harder to spot though. The player holding the case can't be spotted with it and thus has to be picked out on the mini-map indicator, if it's enabled. Hold the Briefcase is a variation of this. Whoever is holding the briefcase gains points the longer they hold it. Unlike similar modes in other games, you are free to fire back at enemies while holding the case. Pop-A-Cap, aside from having a very cringeworthy 90's "white guys trying to sound street tough" name, is essentially a twist on the previous mode. Instead of holding a case, the game randomly selects someone to be "it", and all other players have to kill whoever's "it". Whoever is "it" simply has to stay alive to gain points, and whoever kills them becomes the new target. Hacker Central is... well it depends on how many players are on each team. When played with teams of 1, the game is a slog. One player has to first collect a hacking tool, then stand in front of a hacking terminal, unable to defend themselves, until the hacking tool completes. With just one player per team, this is dull and only ends when everyone gives up on just being killed and no one getting any points. However, the game becomes a lot more interesting with team sizes of two or more, where players can actually form some sort of strategy to defend the hacker. Lastly, there's King of the Hill. Unlike many implementations, instead of putting a circle down of a fixed size marking the hill location, Perfect Dark instead alters the wall texture color to indicate a whole sector or room as "the hill". This means it can be an incredibly large area such as the bottom floor of an open arena, or as small as a tiny square a team has to pack into that's at the corner of two hallways and visible through windows in another. A rule can be set on whether the hill moves after every point, or stays at a fixed location.
Most weapons, save for gadgets, the Goldeneye weapons, and the psychosis gun in particular, are available in multiplayer. These include more balanced preset lists, or a full level of customization so the player can make their own stage loadouts. There are a whole selection of brand new arenas, and three fan favorite levels from Goldeneye, with some tweaks and enhancements. There has been much speculation as to just why Facility was renamed Felicity, but as it turns out it was simply an in-joke with the level designer, much like the cheese (the nature of this in-joke has yet to be publicly revealed). It had nothing to do with copyright issues. One thing worth noting is the shift in focus when it comes to the new level designs. While the previous levels had as much of a focus on espionage and sneaking around as the game levels they're based on, this time around most of the levels are designed as direct combat arenas first and foremost. For those who liked the sneaking, traps, and subtlety Goldeneye combat focused on, this made the newer levels feel like a step down. I think in some ways I agree, but there are a couple levels I love in the new set. First is Grid, based roughly on the "ground floor" scene in The Matrix and with enough twists and turns and unique locations to keep people guessing. The second is Fortress, which is perfectly arranged for 4 team capture the case or king of the hill. Beyond that, the Skedar level has too much unreliability with the doors to be all that fun (an issue that also plagues speedrunning the single player version), and the car park is simply far too vast, with every floor being utterly cut off from every other. So, some new levels do have some issues outside of the shift in focus, but all in all since the most popular Goldeneye levels have been brought in, it still feels like overall the mutliplayer selections have all improved.
Simulants (bots) are another new addition, based on similar popular AI controlled entities in other shooters like Quake 3 Arena at the time. These however had a lot more player accessible customization than average, and they're surprisingly capable. They can be assigned to teams the same way any player can. In total, the N64 game allows for four human players and eight simulants at once. However, playing with these numbers in large levels combined with explosive weapon loadouts can cause the game to slow to an unplayable crawl. It's better to manage the numbers a little better to maintain playability. Simulants have a number of "personalities" that can be assigned, such as "cowardsims" who only attack when their algorithm detects an advantage, or "vengesims", who seek out whoever last killed them to the exclusion of all else. The difficulty of their AI can be set from "meat", which are more or less walking targets, to "Perfect". At that level, they can turn and aim as fast as if they were using mouse controls, always run as fast as a diagonal run, and switch their objectives instantly the moment players change the situation on the map. "Dark" is a level further beyond that. At that level, if Perfect felt like the enemy was cheating, Dark removes all doubt. Dark sims can pull off perfect aim with wildly inaccurate "crowd clearing" weapons like the reaper, instantly whip around for those headshots while running perfectly fast in reverse, and often simply manifest objects into their hands when you aren't looking. So long as the mini-map is enabled, their wave function stays collapsed but if you disable it, these quantum monsters now will teleport to whatever location their AI deems appropriate so long as a player doesn't see them do it. In the setting, the combat simulator is a holographic training facility and "Dark Sims" are modelled off of advanced robots that are faster and stronger than humans, explaining some of this cheating. All in all, it's very fun to play on a team with three friends and form a defensive base against an army of perfect or dark sims just to see how long you can hold out. This has shades of modern "horde" modes when done this way.
The AI really has it's chance to shine, and frustrate, in the combat challenges. Thirty in all, completion is kept independently for 1-4 players, so full completion means going through this four times, with differing numbers of players each. Frankly, that's a bit much to ask someone to put together with their friends, so fortunately there's a glitch that can be abused to just "complete" the challenges on the higher player count without actually playing them all. Of course, I'd recommend at least playing the one player versions the intended way. These all consist of specially baked scenarios with preset enemies, allies, weapons, and objectives with occasional interesting little twists too. The difficulty is fairly low key early on, and only really starts to become challenging in the 20's upward. The last few challenges, involving numerous perfect and dark sims, border on outright unfair. A lot of luck and exploitation of AI weaknesses will be required to handle these challenges. I think at that point the challenge goes a bit too far in the unfair direction. When that much luck is required, it's not really fun. However, one key note. These challenges unlock multiplayer features from maps to weapons to scenarios to customized options. Fortunately, the very hardest ones are past that point of unlocking things, which is a small mercy. All in all, it adds yet more replay value to the game for subsequent playthroughs without stretching the game out too long.
For customization, aside from the nuanced control of rules and weapon loadouts, players can also fully adjust which music they want to play and create a custom playlist on top of that. They can also select not just a character but an outfit from any available in the game, plus a few additional bodies that didn't quite make it into the campaign. This includes mixing and matching human and alien heads and bodies. While Oddjob was notoriously short and hard to hit in Goldeneye, Maians made up for this with massive heads that made headshots far easier. However, by combining a human head with a maian body, something even harder to hit than Oddjob is born. Sadly, Skedar are not a playable option. Their animations and behavior are just too different from the stock human bodies to have worked well without a lot of custom work. The closest option to that is playing as Mr. Blonde. Incidentally, this is also what happens in Counter-op when respawning puts the counter agent into a skedar body. They simply becomes another Mr. Blonde. Oh yes, it should be noted any custom game scenarios players cook up can be saved to the memory card and brought with them as well.
With all of these features, multiplayer has been enhanced to such a degree it's hard to go back to Goldeneye. About the only thing missing would be the rest of Goldeneye's levels brought over, or a map editor, but short of that this is one of the most complete multiplayer experiences available.
--- Cheats and other bonuses ---
It's a Rare tradition! Provide plenty of cheats and make players earn them! There's a massive number available this time around, one for almost every stage! Well, that's the thing. Unlike Goldeneye, there are no par times for the bonus levels. It's a shame since there's a few cheats missing that were in Goldeneye as well. There's no fast and slow animations (but there's a universal "slo mo" cheat now), and no "enemy rockets". There's also no "turbo speed" cheat, but there is a "fast motion" option for multiplayer that no longer counts as a cheat. A few other former cheats were graduated to full options though. Paintball mode is now simply an option that can be enabled without being considered cheating, and turning off the radar is simply a multiplayer option. The Goldeneye style aiming reticle however IS considered a cheat. There's also a number of additional cheats like "Hurricane punches", for when you want to just destroy an enemy, and infinite laptop gun ammo, or even infinite ammo without reloads. What's a shame is there's room for more cheats if only so many weren't just subsets of other better cheats. There's a "perfect darkness" cheat that casts the whole world in a black filter, but doesn't actually blind the enemy. Also, the "cloaking device" cheat is essentially a weaker version of the invisibility cheat from Goldeneye.
All in all, while some of the new cheats are unique and fun additions, like the psychosis gun for turning enemies to allies, others are downgrades, and the missing par times for bonus levels means less challenges to overcome in those cases as well. The cheats are of course welcome, but it all comes down as a bit of a wash between the two. No clear winner here.
The statistics gained in multiplayer however lead to something interesting. Each statistic has hidden "milestones", and reaching a certain preset number of these milestones across all statistics causes a rank up. After a long period of grinding, the coveted rank of "Perfect: 1" is attained, along with a revealed username and password. Originally, these were meant to be used with Perfect Dark's "augmented reality" ad campaign web sites, but those sites went down earlier than expected and the codes never did get properly used. Still, it was a unique idea, even if getting to that rank involved far more grinding than it should have. (Literal days of leaving a controller with buttons or a stick taped down to run in long circles.)
-- And in the end ---
What we finally received from Rare was their last great hit. Conker's Bad Fur Day would be another great game released a year later to end out their run of N64 games (a game Nintendo refused to publish forcing Rare to do so themselves), but this was the last million seller they'd produce that made such a name for itself. It was a game that truly improved on just about everything Goldeneye offered, and while it falls short of being "perfect", it's certainly one of the greatest games of it's generation, PC or console. If only it had a good framerate and perhaps a higher resolution....
Enter the XBox 360 version. This version was commissioned and done by 4J studios using the original code provided by Rare as the base, where the unreleased Goldeneye remaster was done directly by Rare themselves. I'll get into the numerous changes made to this edition. Note that this is for a fully patched version of the game. The patch fixed issues involving the timing of explosions and the laptop gun as well as adding extra control options. Of course, the game now mostly runs at a smooth 60FPS. Oddly, explosions still cause the game to stutter a bit, and massive chains of them can still make the frame rate crawl, but not nearly to the extent of the original. Beyond that, the gameplay is identical to the N64 original. Even most of the glitches and exploits for speedrunning are still intact. The only one of note that I honestly think shouldn't have been "fixed" is that now the devastator can no longer be used to blow up Carrington's files "before" Carrington orders you to do so, making that particular time trial much less flexible than before. Controls, with a little prodding, are also mostly improved and now work just like most modern duel stick FPS controls. Sadly this makes diagonal running MUCH trickier. I wish they'd allowed the d-pad (bad as the 360 dpad is) to be used for movement, but alas that's not the case. Instead, you must find JUST the right angle to get that diagonal run boost, and it's not even doable on every 360 pad. Of all the pads I own myself, only one actually is calibrated JUST right to allow for it, and unfortunately 360 gamepads can't be manually calibrated in any way. The game does allow for some minor buttons reassignment, to make buttons for reloading and the like match one of three popular franchises. I picked the "Duty Calls" one myself. Crouching is now assigned to it's own independent button! This is great in many ways, but there's no longer any "quick" way to go from fully standing to fully crouched. This also means the "secondary" mode for the sniper rifle was simply removed. There was simply no point in it even being there when zooming and crouching no longer overlap.
Textures and models have been updated across the board. They don't make the game look like Halo Reach or anything, but they make the game look sharper, like what it MIGHT have looked like as an early Gamecube title. Whether this is an improvement is a matter of opinion. Maians now look like wrinkly old naked people instead of silvery smooth cute buddies, and so I'd say that was a notable downgrade. Other changes are also hit or miss. Sometimes the "interpretations" change enough details that an object will look entirely different, and other times it'll look simply like an enhanced version as intended. Their interpretation of Maian tech shifts from "liquid metal" to "aquatic lifeform" for example. Of note is that many of the heads based on old employees from both Rare and Nintendo have been replaced with the then current staff of Rare, 4J, and Microsoft. While it's a shame that Miyamoto is no longer guarding the Pelagic II in a Fire Mario suit (because he's got real firepower, see), at the very least now we have Peter Molyneux as the new elevator guard at dataDyne. Yes that's right. MS's most fabled liar can now be punched and kicked repeatedly in the opening and closing cinematics between levels! They've also added an additional character for multiplayer, the "Agent" from Crackdown 2. That's... well it's whatever but at least they made the model intentionally undetailed to more closely resemble the N64ish look of the rest of the game. The four cheats that previously had an alternative unlock if you plugged in the Gameboy Color Perfect Dark with a transfer pack now unlock if the game detects a save from Perfect Dark Zero on your console.
Audio has also been enhanced in many ways, and this one is a more objective enhancement. Voice and sound effects generally play at a higher bitrate based on the original samples, and music was remastered using the original instrument samples as well. Some of the songs, however, sound rather different in their recomposition, and thus are open to interpretation.
There's been a few tweaks as well. Times now display to greater precision showing the milliseconds as well, but the Perfect Dark speed running community never really "took" to this version. Still, it's an appreciated detail. Further, the Goldeneye weapons are now fully selectable in multiplayer, and in fact all multiplayer options are selectable right from the start instead of requiring unlocking through challenges. Difference species heads can no longer be mixed together in this version without a special cheat. Hold down "RB" while switching from head to body and now they can be mixed, but the reason this was normally prevented reveals itself. The new models don't "mesh" right and now gaps show between head and body when the species don't match.
The two big gameplay changes this time around are in online modes and the new "Awards" system. Mutliplayer is as fully featured as 360 games were expected to be at the time. Full support for "parties", leaderboards, matchmaking, access to your friend's list, and so on. That's where "Awards" come in. These are similar to the game's achievements, but they go a step beyond. The list of achievements is mostly just an incomplete list of things you do to get 100% completion in the game anyway, plus minor stuff like killing an enemy with each weapon and just destroying Carrington's entire wine collection. However, one is locked behind getting all the awards, and that's only doable so long as 360 online support remains operational.
While achievements are progress stored both locally and online, "Awards" are stored solely online and saved to an ongoing profile for player's Perfect Dark progress. It's an extension of the game's leaderboard system, in fact, though it was almost never used after MS introduced it. In one way, this is frustrating. Once MS's 360 services go dark, there will be no way to attain progress in these rewards. I'd rather they have been part of the typical achievement system. Secondly, there is no clear indication of what the award even wants you to do. You're given an icon and a silly little quip and the rest is up to you to just guess at. The community has come through here, breaking the code and figuring out the objectives (with a little uncertainty on some specifics here and there) for each of these rewards. Their implementation may have been left wanting, but what they add is a whole new collection of unique challenges throughout the game. There's some multiplayer focused ones, the hardest of which is gaining every "medal" possible. Like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark awards silly little medals based on playstyle after a game. Things like "most shielded" or "most cowardly". Getting all of them nets you this reward. The majority of awards are additional challenges for the game proper. Each one must be done on a particular difficulty level for a particular level. One involves completing Carringon's Villa while getting scopeless headshots on 8 enemies, for example. Of these awards, three were particularly challenging, and not just to do but to figure out. Three must be done in co-op. That's not to say all three actually require a friend's help to accomplish, but that all three must literally be done while in the co-op mode or even if you do meet the objective, it won't count. No, not even with an AI buddy. It must be done with a second player, full stop. Of these three, technically two don't actually need someone to help you. One can be done completely solo (beating the G5 Streets level in under 35 seconds), and the other can be done with you switching back and forth between two controllers (on Air Force One, accomplish objective 2 BEFORE objective 1 and then finish the level all within a certain time, which can be done by having player 2 just stand in the right spot until a cutscene starts, immediately tossing a timed mine, then switching back to player one and skedaddling right the heck outta there. The last of these is the only one that truly can't be done without another person at the controls, and that's completing the first and second objectives in under a minute at the Carrington Institute, then finishing the rest of the level in whatever time but without using the RCP-120's cloaking feature once. If you want to know why this review took so much longer after my Goldeneye one, THIS is the reason. I had to convince a friend to take the time to grind out this particular accomplishment. In all fairness, once I did, it was actually pretty enjoyable. Neither of us got frustrated because we went in knowing it would involve many restarts, and unlike me this friend hadn't played Perfect Dark in a good long while so at first there was a lot of relearning involved, but eventually we got it done. It's just that the stars had to align to make this something this friend actually wanted to do. That, and the game takes longer to 100% than Goldeneye does, since there's so much more to do. Once this and all the other awards were finally attained, I sat on top of a 201% completion rating according to the leaderboard and could finally weigh in on all this. Let me just get this out of the way. I don't think there should be multiplayer dependent awards, in the same way I don't think co-op should have par times for cheats exclusive to it. It makes it all the harder for anyone to ever actually complete the game, and not in a fun way, save having someone else who actually cares about a 23 year old game enough to play a 13 year old remaster of it with you. All in all though, it did add a lot of new experiences and challenges to the old game, and that much I do appreciate. The awards? No new cheats I'm afraid, just a few "gamer icons", some avatar accessories, and a new theme.
All in all, the 360 release comes out as the ideal way to experience the game, for now. It's just a shame there's no "quick button" to revert back to the visuals and sound of the N64 release like Halo or Monkey Island's remakes did, and again the diagonal running aspect is far too tricky to pull off. Just a few changes, which at this point are unlikely to ever happen, would make this one truly perfect. Also, still no map editor outside of the modding community. But, it's easy enough to get this version on even the newest XBox consoles and for cheap.
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