Perfect Dark Zero is GOOD

[Smoke]

The King is dead. Long live the King.

1up.com Impressions

Where did the day go? I stepped away from PDZ's singleplayer missions to hop online against Microsoft on Xbox Live an hour ago. Now I look out my window and it's dark as night outside. In short, PDZ is a blast online. We only played free-for-all and team deathmatch, as well as capture-the-flag with a bunch of editors, testers, and bots.

What's immediately impressive about the multiplayer mode (and I imagine this stands for the game in offline, splitscreen as well) is that the bots behave mostly realistically. They hang back in groups at choke points on maps and take shots from behind cover, as well as take plenty of aggressive opportunity to rush objectives, especially if they see little in the way of defense. I've even had a bot creep up behind me while sniping and whack me on the back of the head. Since there aren't a whole lot of "real" PDZ players online at the moment, we mostly had to resort to creating large 16 player games with a mix of bots and humans. At one time, we put all player characters on the Dark team against all bots as Datadyne on the hardest difficulty, and we got a royal spanking from the A.I. From my hands-on time so far, the bots don't appear to be too cheap with their tactics or shoot with amazing accuracy.

So does it feel like Halo 2 multiplayer? Not really. It feels more like a faster, crazier version of Perfect Dark on N64, this time with near-perfect framerates and not a slowdown hiccup in sight.

PDZ Direct Feed Videos

GAF Discussion

IGN Impressions

While Charles and Jon teamed-up in co-op at one TV, I jumped into a four-player split-screen match. All MP matches are configurable, and we picked shotguns, rifles, pistols and rocket launchers to start. We played through the sewers and streets levels, each of which are built upon multiple stories, so you can snipe, escape, and explore a little to find better weapons. The first thing I noticed was how many hits a character can take by default. You can literally pelt the crap out of another character and they'll live through it. In that way, PDZ feels like GoldenEye. You can adjust this factor with a slider, and you'll also want to instantly switch the control sensitivity instantly. It's set at default to 50%, but you'll want to immediately change to a minimum of 75%.

Perfect Dark Zero plays and feels exactly like the N64 original; even the music is a nostalgic homage to the original's synth-rock soundtrack. This could be considered good news or bad news depending on what camp you're in. If you're expecting an all-new, revolutionary FPS experience, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment. If you're looking to play a technically impressive evolution of the Perfect Dark series then you'll be sound as a pound.

PDZ Impressions from a PDZ clan

The Weapons in the game are nothing short of amazing, BALANCE, BALANCE,BALANCE.
The Perfect Dark Balance has been preserved. You have a pistol, he has dual cmp-150's? who wins? who ever is better. Gone are the days in Halo 2 where the one with the rocket and sword dominates the match. I've only managed to kill JPK once in 2 seconds via 3 well placed head shots, most battles take a while In Perfect Dark Zero... Just like the first one, you don't got any of those completley unbalanced weapons.

It's funny, the PD0 controls arn't as jerky or fast as the halo controls, but the game is WAY WAY faster paced, Dont worry though it's just like PD. Let's just say when I picked up the controller I was a Instant pro because I played the first do death, so yes playing the original PD right now will help you gain skill in PD0. In the build we've played we where not able to dual weild two different g uns(except gernade), but that's ok if they leave that out of the final game it's obviously due to the balance issues it would pose.