The game’s biggest misfire is the attempt to inject personality via a comedy sidekick: Elvis, an alien with a fondness for sticking his bulbous cranium into your firing line. Wandering around its rooms means meeting a succession of extremely camp British types who coo things such as “Welcome to hacker central.” The writing isn’t inspirational, with Joanna Dark not so much a character in search of an author as a cipher in search of a magazine cover. This extends to the supporting cast, most of whom can be found in the Carrington Institute, a brilliantly realised hub for the game that later doubles up as one of the finest singleplayer levels. These banal lines are typical of a heroine who combines Pierce Brosnan and Julie Andrews yet still lacks charm. “I was ready half an hour ago, it’s you that’s making us late,” goes another as she enters in an evening gown. “Cute, very cute,” she quips when looking at a crate bomb. There are complexes to infiltrate, computers to hack, hoverbikes to ride, then the lady herself: Bond in a catsuit, apparently voiced by Mary Poppins. Perfect Dark’s grimy hi-tech vision of the future showed the cinematic influence here is Blade Runner, shiny office buildings rising out of dirty streets. Rare couldn’t abandon the espionage angle that dovetailed with its design talents: double-helix levels with spiraling objectives, enemy positions perfect for the stealthy, patient player, and the glorious gadgets. The lack of a licence brought freedom and yet, in this context, choosing to make an FPS with a secret agent may not seem the most original move. The ideas had married perfectly, but a second Hollywood tie-in would see diminishing creative returns. There remains a misconception that Rare couldn’t continue with the Bond licence, but the developer in fact rejected the opportunity to make the tie-in to Tomorrow Never Dies, perhaps feeling that a return to 007’s world would offer little more than a retread of the Kalashnikovs, missile sites and gadgets it had already perfected. Perfect Dark can do excess, but let’s shoot the elephant in the room first: GoldenEye. Sequels, even spiritual sequels, have governing rules, neatly encapsulated by Cliff Bleszinski’s “bigger, better, more badass” tubthumping for Gears of War 2.
If Rare had revolutionised what a console FPS could be, Perfect Dark was its belated manifesto. This is an ideas game, as concerned with its own genre’s existence and limits as it is with targets. But what Perfect Dark does have, beyond even GoldenEye and most other FPS-es, is imagination.
Most of all, the always-suspect framerate is now a convicted murderer. The explosions and effects, brilliant in memory, are muted. Those sleek offices and twisting tunnels have morphed into poorly textured geometric mazes.
What a game.Twenty years on from release I must acknowledge that, for a classic multiplayer game, Perfect Dark now suffers from a fairly major fault. Here’s hoping that this new project lives up to how great Perfect Dark Zero was on the Xbox 360. As for the new Perfect Dark, we have no idea when to expect the game but considering it’s a Microsoft published title, one has to assume that it’ll be exclusive to Xbox. Within its folds, you’ll find folks that worked at Bungie, Crystal Dynamics, and Naughty Dog. The Initiative is a pretty well-stocked development studio as Microsoft went around and plucked from the best of the best. Shhh, no-one tell them about IO Interactive’s James Bond game. According to the game’s director Dan Neuburger, The Initiative is reinventing the franchise continuing on to say that, “there really isn’t a game out there that’s hitting that sort of blockbuster secret agent vision”. The term “eco sci-fi” has been thrown around to describe the game’s theme so expect all kinds of burned-up and inhospitable countrysides. The trailer itself was very much a teasing affair as the cinematic showed off some of the destruction Agent Dark has wrought while searching for answers in a corporate skyscraper.
0 kommentar(er)
