Whatever you heard about Perfect Dark Zero is probably true. It’s a below-average shooter that, while still playable in 2022, fails to match the unique vibe of Perfect Dark One. There are no aliens, of course, and that’s less of a sticking point for me than you may think. More importantly, the futuristic and light cyberpunk elements of the first game’s world have been stripped back to a point where the game feels more like an Elseworlds version of Perfect Dark than a chronological prequel. Whatever connective tissue is present has been stretched thin. Joanna has a different hairstyle, personality, and accent compared to her debut. Carrington and Datadyne are the drivers of the plot, but they’re portrayed as warring private armies instead of spy agencies. Knowing the two games are supposedly set a few years apart, reconciling them together just doesn’t make sense. It’s better to think of them as separate universes (and maybe the new Perfect Dark is, too).

Much of the disparity can be linked to the awkward year of 2005 in which Perfect Dark Zero launched alongside the Xbox 360. This is a period of shooters post-Halo, but pre-Modern Warfare. The original game’s style of console shooter is out of fashion, but no other games have re-set the template for this genre yet. This has cover and health regeneration, which are both clunky compared to what would come just months later. Your weapon wheel has been replaced with swapping in the field. But in a more old-school design choice, there is a maximum of one checkpoint per stage, none on harder difficulties. The game is an awkward adolescent released just prior to shooters’ renaissance and oppressive dominance over the generation.

Likewise, Perfect Dark Zero arrived before the Bond reboot Casino Royale, firmly entrenched in the period of looking down the nose at the classic spy genre. While the game was, surprisingly, concepted in a cartoony art style, fan backlash changed the direction to increased realism. Both sides had a point. That concept art is actually very bad. Also, the final presentation has aged abhorrently. How is it that Joanna fights through a mountain palace death match, a ruined jungle temple, and a freakin’ underwater lab with a space shuttle on it, yet none of it leaves any impression? Textures are muddy and oddly shiny. Character animations look stilted without any of the exaggerated charm of the original. The only exception is the hilariously unstable ragdoll system. As a generation’s launch game, Perfect Dark Zero enjoyed the allure of new fidelity. But that generation has not been treated kindly by age, and this game has suffered the worst. The artists didn’t do any futureproofing to resist it.

So, aside from curiosity, I can’t think of a single reason to recommend a playthrough of Perfect Dark Zero in 2022. That doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t any fun. Obviously, I was committed to seeing the game through due to the Rare Replay pact. I went in with guarded expectations, and I have to say that a casual playthrough on the easiest difficulty is perfectly enjoyable. It’s not an inspired game by any means, but it’s still competent. Certain weapons actually do retain sci-fi attributes, and experimenting with their firing modes is neat. One SMG has a detective mode that plasters the screen orange with red highlights. It quickly became my weapon of choice, for better or worse, allowing me to easily identify targets like the Predator and feed them my wrath. Vehicle and escort missions are here, but they are not nearly as bad as you may fear. In one particularly unusual moment, driving a bouncy hovercraft over an open snowfield, my brain was momentarily tricked into thinking this was Halo. Limited regenerating health and optional waypoint lines really do ease the frustration. The first playthrough isn’t great by any means, but it’s easy to see the ways in which it could have gone much, much worse.

The despair finally set in when I turned my eye to the achievements. I can’t fully hate the way achievements are implemented in Perfect Dark Zero because it was one of the earliest titles to ever have them. That said, it doesn’t get much less creative than this. Achievements are in one of two categories: clearing the campaign on each difficulty and multiplayer milestones. Firstly, I want to applaud the choice to not require online play for any achievement. Split screen and bot matches will work just fine, which makes my journey actually possible. Especially since no one in their right mind should be playing this game online in 2022. That’s where my enthusiasm ends, though, as marathoning through 750 of the game’s 1000 Gamerscore is clearly not what the designers intended. If you were all-in at the 360 launch and played for months on end, you could conceivably reach 1000 deathmatch games played naturally. But that’s definitely something that makes me feel sick and full of regret. There are tiers of milestones in every game mode, most on that level of obnoxiously high. Grinding these challenges out is time-consuming, tedious, and pointless, but at least it’s not difficult. Guides are freely available for good farming setups, and then you can watch TV while your number ticks up invisibly.

If you totally exhaust the competitive multiplayer achievements, you’re looking at a fat 720 Gamerscore for your profile. But for the scholars at home, that’s 30 points shy of the number we need for the Rare Replay stamps. That means dipping back into the campaign. 180 points are locked behind a secret super-duper level of difficulty, which would be moot because we’d pass the threshold anyway. And I am not quite so evil as to force another human player into playing the game co-op with me. I’d rather play Halo and keep the friendship. It looks like the choice is made for us: Complete the game on hard to get those points and move on with my life. As you surely expected, though, things could never be so simple.

In my professional opinion, each difficulty in Perfect Dark Zero is ranked one too low. The easiest I would classify as an appropriate challenge, the second seems to be a little unfairly balanced, the third is rather torturous, and the secret fourth probably gives you the red ring of death, I don’t know. The damage scaling on hard (or “perfect agent”) is severely punishing. I know this because I couldn’t make it past the second stage. You see, I didn’t start out on the easiest difficulty, but on perfect agent. Sorry for misleading you. I spent upwards of half an hour getting through the tutorial stage, and while I’m sure I could breeze through it now, I was very frustrated at the time. Joanna is made of paper here, and the ending shootout destroyed me and sent me back to the start again and again, sometimes inches away from finishing. This is where I first internalized the game’s cruel checkpointing. But I did make it past that challenge, and I still held a degree of confidence that I could finish the rest of the campaign.

Then the nightclub mission happened. It’s the only one I experienced where stealth is mandatory. You start by finding specific enemies and looking at them until a bar slooooowly fills up. But, in a nod to the original Perfect Dark, higher difficulties mean more mission objectives. In this case, each level adds an extra thug to peep until you can play without fear of auto-failure. I’m sure I restarted this mission hundreds of times, playing out the motions again and again. In the process, I discovered just how stupid the AI can be in stealth mode. You can headshot folks in the open with no consequences most of the time. Most of my mistakes were missing a shot, which then prompted an alert and a restart. On hard, the extra challenges would inevitably cause the scene to pop off, evaporating the health needed to stand a fighting chance. Ascending the nightclub means battling guy after guy, highlighting early this game’s bad habit of flushing the system with enemies. It didn’t matter how carefully I played. Some guy would inevitably get the jump on me and take me down in one blast. Remember, on this difficulty there are no checkpoints, so back to the slogging stealth section I went.

I spent a ton of play sessions just beating my head against this one early level. Could I come back with better weapons and skills and finally overcome it? On a long enough timescale, anything is possible. But that would just be this one level. It’s actually one of my preferred levels, since meeting a contact at a nightclub is an appropriately spy-like setup. But in the endgame, when the game becomes poorly paced Call of Duty? This was plainly not going to work. With so many options cut off from me, there was only one path left: Get a little help from my invisible friend. First, I completed the campaign on normal difficulty. This alone was challenging to the point where I knew I was making the correct decision. Then, I plugged in the same old companion who helped me numerous times already. I now needed to somehow play two characters at once to reach the last stinking five points to mathematically secure my stamps.

Shockingly, not only was this a relatively simple tasks, it turned out to be the most fun of my three campaign playthroughs. Here, you can play the game like a rubber band wherein one character goes on like normal until hitting a roadblock that requires the other to catch back up. I was playing on easy again, so the bullet sponge enemies of the past were firmly a memory. Most happily, there’s a revive mechanic. If my lead character went down, I could simply send the other one in their footsteps, mopping up any enemies I missed, reviving player one, and repeating. I’ve heard that co-op is the best way to actually enjoy Perfect Dark Zero. I can add that this is the case even without another live human! Had this game put more thought into its achievements, I might have enjoyed going for silly challenges and playing the game in new ways. Instead, I just squeaked by with enough points to get my stamps with resignation.

Perfect Dark Zero is without question the game that racked up the highest hour count of the 30. Even at the heights of my time with it, my enjoyment never exceeded a six out of ten. It’s hard not to feel a lingering disappointment, even as someone who first played Perfect Dark One immediately preceding it. Rare went the wrong direction from the outset, in the process watering down everything that made the first game worth remembering. Here, we’re left with a game even more entrenched in its time, one that doesn’t exactly wound but still leaves us with what-ifs and a preposterous number of bot matches logged.

Next time: Can Rare exit its HD flop era?

PART 6: The Pinata Game