Perfect Dark Zero Review

Overall Rating

Smooth, stylish graphics
A good solid shooter with good controls
Fantastic XBox Live modes

Not the game it could, and should have been
Weak single player mode
Multiplayer maps are too big for offline play to be as much fun

Perfect Dark Zero, the game that Nintendo fans were crowing about for years, then Xbox fans, and now it finally appears on the 360, but was it worth the wait?

Firstly, the graphics are good, some very detailed textures, good animation and great effects, however there are some very bad textures to be found, and it's all weirdly shiny... You may like or you may not, but one thing you can't deny is that the game has a decent sense of style that at least stops it looking like any random attempt at a futuristic shooter.

If you bought this purely for the single player mode, you'll come away wondering why you bothered. Perfect Dark on the N64 didn't exactly have a great story, but this is almost idiotic, some stages are interesting and it can grip you at parts, but it all seems thrown together, and they must have run out of ideas for the last stage. It's almost laughable and doesn't fit in with the rest of the game at all. There are 13 stages in all and 3 difficulty settings, but as most of the stages are a drag the first time through, you'll not feel like wanting to replay them very much.

However, the multiplayer mode is enough to redeem this. You can play alone with a large number of AI opponents, but alone it still may not hold your interest, throw 3 mates in though for a split screen death-match and you'll enjoy it. The stages are large (as they're designed to hold 30 players) so finding your mates to shoot them can take time, but throw in a couple of AI players and you'll have a blast. There are a good number of weapons to use and most of them are really worth their while. You'll quickly start finding favourites and just have fun toying with all the guns and their secondary modes, and finding out which ones are best to blast your mates with.

Then you have XBox Live, the true saving grace of PDZ. Each stage can hold up to 30 players, so finding people never becomes a problem, and all the games faults just fade away into nothing. This is clearly what rare have spent a lot of time on, and it shows. On Live your days will just vanish, you'll be finishing work and rushing home just to get on PDZ and start blasting people from around the world, and most of the stages are great, which makes things even better; just don't expect much from the jungle stage...

Overall, it's not the sequel (or prequel to be exact) that Rare promised. On your own it's a tedious shooter, the likes of which you've seen countless times, but with 3 mates it's a blast, and when you've got 29 human opponents on Live you'll be left wondering where the last 5 days of you life went, then you'll come back for more, perfect!