Perfect Dark (2000)

The first Perfect Dark entry is a landmark first-person shooter from Rare that expanded on the foundations laid by GoldenEye 007, delivering a rich, futuristic world full of intrigue, espionage, and alien conspiracies. The MC is called Joanna Dark, an elite operative working for the Carrington Institute, navigating missions that range from high-stakes infiltration to all-out firefights. The single-player campaign is impressively varied, offering objectives that go beyond simple “shoot everything” gameplay, including stealth sections, hostage rescues, data retrieval, and sabotage missions. This may not sound like much, but despite 007 showing how flexible shooters can be, this one also showed how original this genre can become.

Each level is meticulously designed, with multiple paths and hidden areas encouraging exploration and creative problem-solving. The game’s weaponry is inventive, featuring guns with secondary fire modes, grenades, and sci-fi gadgets, giving players flexibility in combat and making encounters feel dynamic. The AI provides engaging challenges, particularly on higher difficulties where enemies are more alert and cooperative. The narrative, though not as deep as modern games, is compelling, with memorable characters, cinematic cutscenes, and a sense of urgency that drives you forward.

Unfortunately I never got to experience the multiplayer, so I have nothing to say about this, but I know this was highly praised at the time, similar to the 007 title of the same platform. Graphically, this game pushed the Nintendo 64 hardware to its limits, with detailed environments, lighting effects, and fluid character animations that stood out in 2000. While the controls can feel a bit stiff by today’s standards, the game’s precision aiming and movement mechanics were revolutionary for the console era.

In summary, this very unique shooter is a masterful blend of storytelling and innovative gameplay. It remains a classic of the N64 library, showcasing Rare’s creativity and ambition while influencing future generations of first-person shooters. Its mix of espionage, action, and sci-fi elements ensures it still holds a special place in the gaming history. This is definitely one of the best shooters of all time, and a must-play if you like this genre to any extent, play it any way you can. Which unfortunately is a hard thing nowadays since we never got to see any re-release for modern platforms.

Giving it a 3.5/5!

I played this title on Xbox One, as an included download from the Rare Replay Collection. Definitely is a fun time, especially doing Co-op. The story is fun and does get ever more so over the top. It's a game where you play as a spy, Agent Joanna Dark, but as far as the "Agent" difficulty goes, it turns into lots of running and shoot outs pretty quickly haha.

A major issue with modern AAA games is the lack of a soul within the creative process (there are exceptions such as with FromSoft), a focus on a system to monetize, a minimally acceptable game to slap on the monetization machine and inflating statistics for a marketing gimmick. The inflation statistics is basically making a game that's the same as the previous entry, but just bigger. Technically more quests, larger map and longer playtime. This doesn't impress me. Particularly when you realize that most of these "new" quests will be copy and pasted content to pad out the run time. The goal with most modern sequels is money. While the video game industry is a business, it's a shame that it was discovered it's more profitable to make a monetization machine than a good game (the rise of micro transactions and paid services). Contrast this to Rare in the 90s. When making Perfect Dark they clearly wanted to make something that was an objective improvement across the board from Golden Eye. Except for the performance (Golden Eye also had bad performance) I'd say they knocked it out of the park!

A massively ambitious game that pushed the n64 to it's very limits. This came at a cost... tanking the performance of the game into oblivion into single digit frame rates. So I do feel a bit conflicted over it. I like the art direction and level design. It's just a shame that Rare developed this game on such limited hardware. I hear the 360 remaster is great and most importantly incorporates dual analog controls. I was able to jerry rig a loose approximation of dual analog controls, but it resulted in me not being able to manually aim (because the X and Y axis were now on different joy sticks and the right joystick also toggled crouching.. thus making a slight nudge in the wrong direction cause me to crouch and stand up). Overall that wasn't an issue with my playthrough except for two very specific moments. 1.) Carrington Villa and 2.) the final boss.

For Carrington Villa, you start the mission on a cliff and need to snipe guards to save a hostage. On Secret Agent difficulty on Co-op you have less than 10 seconds to snipe both guards or you lose... impossible with the reconfigured control scheme I made to loosely approximate dual analog controls. Compare this to the lowest difficulty where they seem to give you one minute to do it... feels cheap and unfair given how ungainly the controls are which aren't conducive to quick reaction precision... alas, we had to concede and play the game on the lowest difficulty from this point forward.

For the final boss you need to shoot at him to get him to kneel in front of an altar, then you shoot at the altar to destroy it's parts. Rinse and repeat. Sounds easy right? Well no... Not only is the boss and altar tanky sponges, but due to how auto aim works, you will always lock on to the boss instead of the altar behind him... so you need to manually aim to hit the altar and not the boss... massive headache and annoying with the janky controls and the ONLY other scenario in the whole game where you NEED to manually aim.

Honestly though, besides those few moments, this game rules. It's fun. Levels are varied. Objectives vary further making each level feel unique and fresh. Great art direction. I have a soft spot for pulp adventure novels and cyberpunk and this game is that exact combination. The arsenal is solid. The only real issue I have is how obtuse mission objectives can be to figure out sometimes. The game doesn't do a great job explaining the mechanics. I honestly had to look up online to even figure out how to do the very first objective in mission one... the game never told me to hit pause and manually select a gadget (I had no idea I even had a gadget!)... let alone what to stick it on. Once you get over that hurdle, I didn't really need to rely on walkthroughs except for a few more rare exceptions where the game did a poor job of explaining what you need to do. That said, I still had to fumble around the labyrinthine levels to figure out what I was supposed to do. The levels are surprisingly sprawling.

This was also one of the few n64 games to feature voice acting. It's not good, but I found it to be endearing in a B movie kind of way. It fit given the pulpy disjointed nature of the story. I have no idea why the director wanted Elvis to sound like a dweebish Yoda, but I digged it. Honestly the story felt more like set dressing. The game featured cinematics that were well done and ambitious, but the story itself feels extremely incoherent. Jumping around and shuffling characters. I didn't mind the lack of a coherent narrative. It added to the pulpy fun.

This game is taken to another level with split screen co-op. WAY more fun and engaging even if it comes at the cost of even worse performance and lower resolution. Definitely worth a revisit.

I gotta pay respect to this thing right? Because this is one of the most impressive and immersive shooters that came out before Halo and that's a fucking incredible achievement. So far ahead of its time with the reload animations, location damage on enemies, and even the weapon feedback.

BUT

BUUUUUUT

This game on Perfect Dark difficulty is one of the most bullshit difficulties in all of first person shooters. I can't even imagine what kind of hell nightmare it is to play this game with the N64 controller over Keyboard and Mouse.

I love the 90s PC FPS games, but it's been only a few years since I've discovered the fact that N64 had been a home for so many cool early console shooters like GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, the Turok series, Doom 64. Over 20 years later they're not as groundbreaking as they must have been according to their contemporary reviews, but they're still fun. Mostly simplistic, with portions of puzzles, occasionally labyrinthine maps, platforming elements, and naive, but cute storylines.

Perfect Dark is a good example of that. A few mission objectives were not very clear, which led to a couple of cases of trial and error, but most levels are short, so it was not a big deal for me. Anyway, if you're up for some fun 90s console shooter game, Perfect Dark is a good choice. It's also pretty short - about 6 hours long.