Perfect Dark Zero

Perfect Dark Zero was the game every gamer waiting to get an Xbox 360 was looking for. Perfect Dark Zero (PDZ) follows the story of Joanna Dark in the year 2020 when corporations rule the world.

Although the story line is, at best, pretty lame, it doesn't really spoil the way that the missions are set out. The missions are huge and once loaded, you'll find that there are no more loading screens until the end of the mission. Some gorgeous visuals add to the realism that you get during missions. During a mission in South America, you are stuck in a forest, and the scenery is beautiful. You can see every leaf on every tree. There are a few down sides to this though, because there is no save feature, you cannot save mid mission. This means that the long missions can become frustrating, (a checkpoint which kicks in half way through missions does provide some relief to this though) especially on the tough difficulty levels.

The huge weapon inventory in the game is a huge bonus. The wide variety means that you can take almost any sort of approach on a mission. The only downside to this, is that there is a limit to what you can take. You are given four weapon slots, pistols and melee weapons only take up one slot, SMG's and assault rifles take up two, while heavy weapons (such as rocket launchers and snipers) take up three.

The wide variety means that multiplayer games can have some thrilling moments. The mines provide excellent protection for those that wish to bunker down, while the Vi-blade can be very handy for those that always get caught up in close combat situations.

PDZ is definitely a game any fan of the FPS genre should consider getting. Full credit to Rare for such a great game, 8/10.

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!