Perfect Dark is a game that challenged me. It's made me humble myself as a gamer. As old school games like this make me realize why I fell in love with the medium in the first place. First off, the shooting is phenomenal. I'm a mid 00s zoomie, so FPS games like this are not what I grew up with. Nope, I grew up with big budget shooters like Call of Duty Black Ops 2, Titanfall 2, and Halo Reach. All kino experiences. However, I did get a taste for the old school when, in 2019, I played 007 Nightfire on a 50 dollar PS2 (pre-pandemic retro prices mog today's). Auto-aim, cool gadgets, expansive levels with secrets galore. I enjoyed it at the time, but compared to Perfect Dark, that game was a cakewalk. Perfect Dark on the other hand, kicked my ass. It made me realize how much of a scrub gamer I was. Matter of fact, the reason there is such a long gap between my start and finish date is because I rage quitted!!! Originally my verdict on Perfect Dark was that, it was outdated, overrated, and too vague in it's level design for players to understand. Needless to say, I was butthurt and didn't know what the hell I was talking about! Now that I've beaten the game, I've come to the realization that I love it. The story is super creative and superbly paced. It's an engaging sci-fi espionage tale for the ages. I found it Incredibly riveting. The level design is straight up brilliant. It initially came off to me as hard because I never cared to invest the time into understanding what I was actually playing. However, once I decided to read through the short debriefs before each mission, I realized the game gives you all the tools you need to succeed. It's up to YOU, the player, to execute them. Even if you don't read it, the mission will literally drop almost unavoidable hints about when to use an item to complete a specific task, but because it wasn't spelled out for me, I was initially filtered. Now I see it for what it is. An essential element that keeps the game balanced, whilst preserving the mystery of what's to come. Old-school game design that puts gameplay first. It's organic and efficient, so I have to give it props for wonderful level design. Following that, the shooting in this game feels amazing. The guns are diverse and feel remarkably different from one another. The spy weapons also all have their own personality as well as niche. It all makes for a satisfying gameplay loop of combining the two to complete the objectives for the mission. Also, I must praise the soundtrack, which fits the tone, oh so perfectly. Overall, Perfect Dark Zero is without a doubt a game I love. It's a game that rekindles my love for the medium and inspires me to play more as well as think outside the box! Not to mention, no spoilers, but this game has a satisfying and challenging final boss which I now consider in my top 10.

This was one of the games I grew up playing, and this particular one was my absolute favourite!
I always loved the "Secret Agent" theme, just as I always loved the "Aliens and Area 51" theme!
This game has a sort of Cyberpunk aesthetic, in a futuristic world (which btw takes place in 2023!!! The game was released in 2000, you know...). The perfect agent Joanna Dark (I love this reference) is highly skilled and equiped with some crazy fun high-tech gadgets. Her stealth skills and her intelligence show to be as high as her irreverence... which I LOVE.
To be short, this is a fantastic game, and I recommend ANYONE to try this in an emulator such as 1964 GEPD (it allows mouse and keyboard), if not possible to experience it in the N64 (which was my first way of appreciating it, sooo many years ago...)

Perfect Dark is an overall improvement of GoldenEye 007 in about every category. The 'wow' factor and the influence that GoldenEye created upon its release is obviously not as big in this game but nevertheless Rare were able to, once again, craft an incredibly polished game that set the quality bar very high for its time.

The ambition in Perfect Dark goes all across the board with a more complex (and at times silly) storyline, tons of weapons featuring alien technology, improved graphics and setting (expansion pack required), and a more robust local multiplayer mode with more options and a hint of nostalgia (Complex level from GoldenEye to remember the good old times with friends). While Perfect Dark won't ever carry the influence weight that GoldenEye did, it created a fun environment for console first-person shooter fans with yet another unforgettable local multiplayer mode for the ages. Well done Rare, for this was one of your last masterpieces before the Microsoft buyout.

A classic I remember playing a lot at home and with friends at the local youth club. Created by the same team that brought us Goldeneye (even including a few levels from there) this FPS has you play as a secret agent with a huge variety of guns and gadgets to assist in your missions.

An aspect that I loved in this game was how every weapon has a secondary fire option. Things from using a gun's handle to knock out enemies and changing weapons from semi-auto to full auto to going from unarmed karate chop to disarm and change a assault rifle into a sentry gun to stick on a wall.

The multiplier is pretty insane for a console game of that generation as not only does it have the 4 player combat, but you can play with a large number of bots which was something I had never seen before, having only played console games in the past and never saw again until Time Splitters.

Wished this was made for the modern day as with Internet the way it is these days, we can have much more stable play sessions. Especially for other games with connectivity like Urban Chaos: Riot Response.

I'm putting this on the backlog as I'll be returning to this sometime.

Stream + Gameplay

It's just an FPS at heart, but the secondary abilities of all of the weapons really made for a unique and enjoyable experience - Laptop Gun for days. The graphics are obviously rough compared to present day, but they hold up modestly well. Story was a pretty good sci-fi narrative. The soundtrack, voice acting, and SFX were just too good, even compared to today. Replayability was surprisingly good, with easter eggs and split screen multiplayer. One of the very few games where I've run through the campaign/story more than once.

I wasn't born when this game came out, so I wasn't able to witness or comprehend just how much of a technical marvel this game is when I was younger, but my lord it doesn't mean I can't appreciate and love this game today. Every time I do a playthrough of it I love it more. Every time it releases for a new platform I know I just have to play through the entire game on all three difficulties. The weapons are so fun, the maps are fun to traverse, and the gameplay just feels really smooth even to this day. I don't really know how else to end this, but if you're still complaining about the controls to this day, I will just have to direct you to the 1.2 control scheme. It's as close as a modern control scheme you can get on a single controller.

Perfect Dark is Rare's spiritual successor to Goldeneye, and while pretty much better in every way, despite being almost perfect, there are a few shortcomings that could have been ironed out.

Coming off playing No One Lives Forever 1 and 2, my brain was craving another taste of objective based espionage action. Having liked Goldeneye, and Perfect Dark being in my backlog, it was a perfect time to finally play this.

Overall, everything is an improvement from goldeneye. The story and world are more refined, the graphics are so much better. Gunplay feels a lot better too, and the gadgets and objectives you need to solve in each stage really make you feel like a secret agent.

Perfect Dark's first half takes a similar spy route to 007, but halfway though turns into something more like Alien, which separates Perfect Dark from other espionage type games and gives it it's own alien identity. It also gives the game some interesting alien locations, rather than just facilities and offices.

I really enjoyed my time with Perfect Dark, however there are some frustrations preventing me from giving this a perfect 10. First thing is the fact that there are no checkpoints, I wanted to play this on Perfect Agent difficulty due to the fact that easier difficulties don't give you the full level, and I wanted to see every level in it's fullest. In this difficulty, you can die or fail objectives really easy, which is no problem, it is the hardest difficulty after all, however on a first playthrough you can spend hours trial and erroring levels because each time you progress, something blinesides you and you fail your next objective. On an emulator with saves states, this softens the blow a bit, but playing this on real hardware such as the N64, 360 or PC port, quicksaving is not an option. The 2nd frustration I have is the final boss, not a very well designed boss and kinda soured my taste at the end. Again, doesn't help that you need to start the final level from the beginning if you die.

Because of that, I really recommend emulating this to have that quicksave option, which is also hard to say because that PC port is beautiful.

Despite these issues, Perfect Dark is one the best espionage type games, and I highly recommend it if you are a fan of these.

Perfect Dark had some massive expectations following up a genre-defining experience like GoldenEye. While not as good as it’s predecessor, Perfect Dark is an enjoyable experience in its own right. The story, from what I can remember, is a bit of an off the rails science fiction fantasy. I don’t remember exact details but I recall government conspiracys and weird alien storylines. I’ve tried playing the remastered version on Xbox but like most N64 games, it’s hard to go back to these very dated games.

Perfect Dark is seen as one of if not the greatest first person shooter of all time along with titles such as Goldeneye 007 and Halo: Combat Evolved due to how revolutionary the game is perceived to be, while I respect Perfect Dark in no sense is it a perfect or even great game.

First off the shooting element of this game is much more refined than Goldeneye, mainly due to its hit detection being much more accurate then Goldeneye, but there isn't as wide a range of weapons that are viable in this game as their as in Goldeneye.

Secondly, the campaign in this game is not as good as Goldeneye. The mission's objectives at times are cryptic and strange and the ai can be really shitty sometimes. The whole system of being able to get different objectives due to your difficulty is quite interesting but in practice it's just annoying since most of the time you do not know what you are doing since you are just finding objectives for higher difficulty players.

Not to say that Perfect Dark is bad its just severely dated, for its time this game was amazing but in 2023 its just tedious.