I'm not the biggest fan of the original Perfect Dark game, but I've had a reasonable amount of fun with it. It still holds up pretty well today, if like me you are a fan of the old school shooters.
Perfect Dark Zero came out 7 years later and serves as a prequel to the original game. It is an Xbox 360 launch title and it was released on the same day as such FPS games as Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4, but unlike those two it is awful. The biggest reason for this, of course, is that I DIDN'T LIKE IT.
There's also a more subjective side of things. For some reason protagonist Joanna Dark looks nothing like she did in the original game, which is a weird choice as it makes the game feel disconnected from Perfect Dark. Everything in the prequel looks and feels kind of cartoon-ish - it's not naive-but-cute anymore, it's just childish. While constantly comparing the Perfect Dark games I couldn't help but think of the Deus Ex series: the original Perfect Dark had quite a few visual/stylistic/setting similarities with Deus Ex 1, but the second games in both of those series' feel like a huge departure from the originals. The story lost me almost immediately, as the game failed to make me care for any of the characters, so pretty soon Zero became just a collection of random missions with unnecessary audio introductions in the loading menu.
As a shooter, it's just not fun. In many ways gameplay feels dated, as if you're playing a game from the previous generation. Perfect Dark Zero is one of those games that has enemies moving around chaotically which makes them annoying to hit. It could be a workaround for a dumb as fuck AI. Whatever. At some point it annoyed me so much, that I switched difficulty to easy, because I couldn't stand replaying those long checkpoints anymore. Not that they were that hard, it just wasn't fun trying. In fact, switching to easy was the thing that kept me from dropping the game. Atop of all that Zero has one of the most annoying features I've ever encountered in an FPS game: whenever you empty a clip, the gun doesn't start reloading immediately, instead it just keeps clicking until you release the trigger. This may not sound like the end of the world to you and by all means it isn't, but this happened to me a lot and I hated it.
Perfect Dark Zero has it's moments, when the game gets okay. For me those were primarily sections of running and gunning, but they were just okay, nothing more. After the original game it feels like a huge letdown and even by the launch title standards it's pretty bad. Remember Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4? Well, I hope you didn't choose Zero over any of those when you got your Xbox 360 at launch. However, as an eternal optimist, I hope the recently announced new Perfect Dark game will improve a lot. After Perfect Dark Zero there's a gigantic room for it.
P.S. There's one more thing, that amused me a lot, but which I didn't know where else to put. Anyway. There's a jungle forest level in the game and the enemies wear camouflage, which is smart of course. Its color is brick red though. GG. Could it possibly be they're preventively camouflaging their future gunshot wounds?
