Retro spotlight: Perfect Dark Zero

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Perfect Dark Zero was supposed to be a GameCube game, a followup to the incredible Perfect Dark on a platform that could actually handle the ambition of its developer, Rare. Just a couple of minor things happened between that initial plan and announcement and the actual release of Perfect Dark Zero, though. Such as Microsoft purchasing Rare when the Stamper brothers, the founders of Rare, wanted to sell the company, and Nintendo had decided to move on from them, rather than adding to their existing 49 percent stake. Microsoft’s acquisition of Rare shifted development of Perfect Dark Zero from the GameCube to their platform from that generation, the Xbox, but then Microsoft decided to exit the Playstation 2-GameCube-Xbox era a year before the competition to release the Xbox 360. And so, Perfect Dark Zero transitioned to yet another new platform, to serve as an attractive launch title.

In some ways, this improved the experience of Perfect Dark Zero, but in others, it was a negative: Rare having to spend so much time (and with such a small team of around 25 people, as Rare always worked lean when they could get away with it, even at the start of the HD era) reworking Perfect Dark Zero for new platforms, and then being forced to target the Xbox 360 launch date, caused them to cut a ton of planned content that, in the end, made Perfect Dark Zero lesser than the game it was a prequel to, despite releasing five years and two console generations later.

It also didn’t help matters that the Rare that made Perfect Dark Zero wasn’t the Rare that made Perfect Dark: the studio had gone through a couple of exoduses in the five years in between. The Stampers left, but so too did a not-insignificant chunk of the original Perfect Dark staff which had exited the studio even before that game had wrapped, and went on to form Free Radical. TimeSplitters 2 isn’t exactly like Perfect Dark, either, but you can feel part of that experience through TimeSplitters, for sure, especially when it comes to some of the more lighthearted, goofier, and straight-up out there elements of the game.

This is not to say that the version of Rare that developed Perfect Dark Zero wasn’t any good, or anything of the sort — a genuine plea for that to not be the takeaway here. Perfect Dark Zero might not be Perfect Dark, but it has plenty of moments and is enjoyable even now. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is the best of that series because it took some huge swings that connected while better reining in some of the first two titles’ worst, of-the-era tendencies. And Viva Piñata is just tremendous, can’t say enough good things about Viva Piñata. This is where the “However” you knew was coming goes, though. Nintendo declined to make a full purchase of Rare when the time came for that specifically because of how much of a talent drain there had already been, and the one implied by the forthcoming exit of the Stampers: Rare was integral to Nintendo’s past success, on multiple platforms, but it was going to be a different studio going forward with different people, and with Nintendo making their own strategic changes — including more of a focus on first-party studios and partnerships with third-party ones, rather than second-party arrangements — the fit just wasn’t right like it had been before. Rare wasn’t even the only studio Nintendo retreated from: they sold their stake in Left Field Production, the developer of Excitebike 64, back to the company in 2002.

So, Nintendo let Microsoft swoop in and purchase Rare, which wasn’t quite the ridiculously prolific Rare that Nintendo had worked with during the N64 era, as it was evolving into its next form in a much different form of the industry it had been in for decades. This version of Rare still had plenty to offer — see above — but Microsoft would end up making them a Kinect studio to help push that console add-on, which led to yet another exodus that included developers who had worked on games like Perfect Dark Zero, so they could make the games they wanted to make once more.

When Perfect Dark Zero launched, reviews were mixed. Critically, it performed admirably, with an 81 on Metacritic in spite of a buggy launch and some obvious holes where planned content was supposed to be. User score is a metric fraught with unreliability, but 2005 was at least a little bit of a different time before user scores were wielded like weapons to make some kind of point or another, so you can probably glean more from that 6.4 out of 10 figure than you could with a present-day release. None of the complaints worth paying attention to were necessarily new ones from users compared to the reviews from critics, but everything that they agreed was wrong was just more of a problem for the former group: the voice acting was embarrassingly poor for 2005, the game was full of bugs, the redesign (and retconning) of Joanna Dark herself wasn’t particularly well-received, the multiplayer wasn’t considered as fully featured or possessing as many options as the N64’s Perfect Dark, the game’s story was perplexing, boring, and poorly told… there were a lot of negatives there.

Maybe more reliable than user scores is a look at Perfect Dark Zero’s achievements. Just over two percent of everyone who played Perfect Dark Zero bothered to complete the game on Secret Agent, which is, depending on how you want to view what playing on Agent is, either the “Normal” difficulty or the easiest of the “Hard” ones. Only 1.74 percent of everyone who started up Perfect Dark Zero bothered to play even 100 rounds of Deathmatch, which was, now that it included online multiplayer and the ability to support up to 32 players in a single map at once, supposed to be part of the game that would have players coming back again and again for more. Perfect Dark Zero sold well over one million copies, and was the Xbox 360’s first Platinum Hits re-release, but those one million-plus players didn’t spend all that much time with the game.

You could negatively compare Perfect Dark Zero’s 1.5 million in sales to Perfect Dark’s reported 3.2 million, but remember that you’re comparing a launch title with a massive attach rate at the time of its release to a late-life game on a console with tens of millions more players in its userbase. Still, though, it’s not like people kept buying Perfect Dark Zero well into the Xbox 360’s lifespan, and why would they have, when the people who did buy it didn’t even keep at it?

In spite of all of the negative things you could say about Perfect Dark Zero, the core of the game was still strong, which is why it ended up with the kind of positive reviews it did from critics. The shooting felt good, while new features like combat rolls and the cover system helped move Perfect Dark’s formula into the future. The campaign might have featured a story I forget the details of even while I’m in the midst of playing it, and voice acting that somehow made me glad for the fact that the audio balance is way off, causing sound effects and music to swell to a volume that drowns out all of the dialogue, but it’s undeniable that it’s fun to pop on the secondary fire feature of the RCP-90 that allows you to see the screen in infrared, and then, using the analog trigger of the Xbox 360’s controller, subtly and efficiently zoom in and out as needed to pick off the red bodies that appear amid that mess.

It’s undeniable that the mission structure works splendidly because of how loose it all is: rather than making everything required like in the original Perfect Dark, there are required objectives, and then optional ones. The optional ones boost your score for clearing the level, which is fine if you care about it, but more importantly, they can impact the rest of the stage itself. Radio in with your voice disguised to try to convince your foes to go radio silence for a bit, allowing you some freedom to wreak havoc. (It should be noted, too, that you have to actually do the convincing yourself by correctly choosing a dialogue option based on how the person on the other end of the radio responds to you.) Hack into a system near the beginning of a stage to allow your handler to later manipulate said system in a way that will benefit you during a boss fight. If you choose not to do this stuff because you can’t pull it off or it’s annoying to you, then don’t! But there are rewards there if you care to be completionist or completionist-ish about objectives, and having the freedom to go for it or bounce — or even choosing not to restart the stage if you mess it up and just roll with not completing the optional objective — feels pretty good.

There are more required objectives that make levels more complex depending on your difficulty level. Agent has the least required of you, both in terms of how difficult your enemies are as well as how many super secret spy things you’ll need to pull off in order to progress. Secret Agent ramps up the capabilities of your foes considerably, but they still have the occasional moment where they stare right at you firing and never seem to hit you, leaving you plenty of space for some haphazard planning or completing objectives even while actively messing them up. Perfect Agent requires you to be pretty much that in order to pull anything off, with you also having a whole lot more you need to be doing, and Dark Agent is that but only more so. You can play missions again once you’ve cleared them without interfering with story progression, just like in the original Perfect Dark, but one thing that’s changed here is that you can change your loadout to reflect whatever weapons and spy gadgets you’ve accumulated to that point in the game. So, going back to complete an earlier mission with a weapon you didn’t have access to until late-game can help you clear it more effectively/violently, or, being able to use a gadget that’ll unlock some doors you weren’t able to unlock before can lead to some different outcomes in terms of how quickly or efficiently you can clear optional objectives.

These gadgets include things like the Datathief for hacking computer systems, or the CamSpy for sneaking around areas Jo can’t fit into herself. The Locktopus unlocks doors, the Demo Kit blows things up on a short timer, and… well, that’s it. There are fewer gadgets in Perfect Dark Zero than in Perfect Dark, just like there are fewer truly out-there weapons and secondary fire options, but that’s probably a two-fold issue. The first being that this is a prequel, so by nature, there’s going to less escalation in both technology and wildness, so as to not undo all of Joanna Dark’s perfectly acceptable “I’m sorry, this doctor is a floating laptop and also aliens are involved now?” reactions from the first game, and second, cut content. Perfect Dark Zero is good, but it’s not hard to imagine that it’s a much better game if it gets more time being developed for a single system instead of three different ones over five tumultuous years.

Multiplayer feels similar, in that there’s lots to do, but not as much as there was in Perfect Dark, though that was, in theory, supposed to be a bit of a wash now that the game was going to be online and feature more players on bigger maps. To go back to the above thing about fewer than two percent of the player base bothering to play 100 matches of Deathmatch to this day nearly two decades later after multiple re-releases on multiple Xbox platforms, and we can safely say that it doesn’t seem like it was a wash after all.

On the bright side, at least, the co-op is really something. It’s not just two people playing the same level at the same time, but there are instead a number of stages where you get to play as two different characters in a way that makes it feel like two different missions that just happen to intersect. Take Mission 3, for instance (which is actually the fourth mission, but the first one is labeled “0” since it’s taking place in a simulation). In this, Joanna and her father are working together, but are split up by an ambush in a way that requires daughter to protect father from afar against constant waves of baddies who have been ordered to make sure he dies. In single-player, you’re chasing after a computer-controlled Jack Dark, but in co-op, one of you is actually him, meaning you can be a bit more strategic about the whole deal, leaving Joanna a little bit more freedom of movement to do the other things she needs to do in the level without assuming that’ll mean Jack is going to die for sure. Or there are levels where Jonathan — the same Jonathan from Perfect Dark, yes — needs a hand, and as Joanna in single-player you’re doing all the work yourself, really. But in co-op, you stand a better chance of getting out with the entire squad alive instead of it just slowly being whittled down until only the required parts — yourself and Jonathan — remain alive.

Not every mission is built like this, but when it works it really does work. Once again, it feels like something that more time could have helped, as it could have been even more of a feature to tout. As is, though, with Counter-Operative on the N64 Perfect Dark but not the enormously powerful two-gens-later Xbox 360 game, well, people were able to focus heavily on what wasn’t there instead of what was, without even necessarily being unjustified for doing so.

There’s quite a bit about Perfect Dark Zero I can forgive, despite being as in the tank for Perfect Dark as I’ve been for as long as it’s been now. There are a couple of things that continue to nag at me all this time later, however. That Perfect Dark Zero is nowhere as effortlessly goofy and fun as its predecessor is a problem: your enemies lack the personality of the original, they’re not these big, campy villains ripped out of a Bond flick, and, no offense to Jonathan, but he’s no Elvis. The weaponry isn’t nearly as varied or as fun: it all works and works well, and you can be quite deadly with much of it with practice, but the literal and figurative out-of-this-world elements are sorely missed: the weapons are all so practical, so based on real things, so standard. 

Worst of all, though, is the redesign of Joanna Dark. She was a stand-in for James Bond in the original Perfect Dark — remember, Perfect Dark was the non-licensed followup to Goldeneye 007 that allowed Rare a lot of creative freedom to set the game wherever they wanted with whatever plot and twists they cared to — capable of effortlessly flitting between looks and personalities as the job called for it, as dangerous in a sci-fi catsuit as in full-on mountain gear as in a cocktail dress. She was also, again in the vein of Bond, clearly from the United Kingdom: in Perfect Dark Zero, she is now a mercenary from Atlanta, Georgia, with a dye job and a crop top, regardless of the context. There’s a mission in the snowy mountains, even, and she’s still in a crop top! A planned mission, where she purposefully changed into this little winter jacket-ish thing that still allowed for the cropping of tops! Should I be annoyed about this sort of thing? In a vacuum, no, but when you don’t stick the landing on a jump you didn’t need to make, well. Absolutely.

It all just feels a little off, and it’s good to see that the plan for the reboot is to once again have Joanna Dark hail from her original home, with something closer to her original haircut. She’s back to her Winona Ryder But British roots, and hopefully the character’s personality also returns to the original inspirations, which the character’s originator, Martin Hollis, detailed in an interview back in 2010:

Listen, Martin Hollis knows a thing or two about haircuts. And he’s right! The design is beautiful. Microsoft got “Joanna Dark” put on the cover of FHM and all as part of the game’s marketing, with a spread inside the magazine and everything. It’s just not right for the game, the genre, and so on, given existing designs and premises and influences.

Honestly, I could take the visual redesign if the outfits still made sense rather than being this oddly branded star-shirt that matched the star neck tattoo, I’m going on tour with Avril Lavigne thing they went with. There’s no defense of making her American, though. Having the two things combine, together? Unforgivably, really. Knowing nothing else about how the new Perfect Dark will work or play, at least we know that this is something the series’ new developers and I agree on.

As said, though, even with all the annoying stuff, some distance has made it clear that there’s still a good game here. The critics had the right of it, and time — which has both dulled some anger and annoyance and allowed Rare the space to fix bugs and add in additional maps — has helped turn Perfect Dark Zero into a better title, as well. It’s still not Perfect Dark, but that’s also an all-timer of a shooter, and the decision to go the prequel route pretty much doomed the idea of besting what truly made that game work from start to finish out of the gate. If you have to play just one, then go with the Perfect Dark remaster that’s also available on the same platforms that Perfect Dark Zero is — they’re both available as part of Game Pass and the Rare Replay collection — but if you’ve got more time and desire than that, you might find Zero is better than you remember it, or better than you heard. Whether it’s good enough, though, or as good as it should have been, is another question entirely. One that requires I also point out that TimeSplitters 2 is available on the Xbox One and Xbox Series systems in 2024, as well.

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