![]() ![]() This is an FPS for gun fetishists: in place of GoldenEye’s ‘dipping’ reload animations, Perfect Dark is the visual equivalent of tonguing the barrel. The RCP-90 is the most powerful automatic weapon in the game, but that’s not enough so let’s add a cloaking device. The laptop gun is all about an SMG of sleek chrome and efficiency, perfectly exemplified when you toss it away and it begins acting as a sentry gun. Assault rifles can shoot but also turn into proximity mines (Dragon) or be switched sideways and become grenade launchers (Superdragon). The Psychosis Gun converts enemies to your cause. It gives you a gun that can shoot through walls, then adds an X-ray sight and auto-targeting as standard (Farsight). Instead it overreaches itself with game-breaking tools just to show that it can. Restraint here would have made Perfect Dark a tighter, more focused experience, helped with its severe framerate issues, and removed almost all of the fun. This all comes from one of the best-ever FPS weapon sets and, oddly enough, its lack of balance. Setting elaborate traps with laptop guns and proximity mines, getting into slap fights and using n-bombs to make opponents run into walls. It’s about drugging big-headed aliens until they can’t see, then strapping mines to their eyes. So ignore the Carrington Institute and dataDyne, the groany story, and the whole thing’s ponderously portentous name and typeface. There’s order, in the form of the game’s story and mission structure, and the chaos of its interactions and weapon sets. Perfect Dark is otherwise po-faced, a microcosm of the duality at this game’s heart. Everyone who has played this game hates Elvis, mainly for that reason (if he dies you fail missions and HE DIES SO MUCH BECAUSE HE’S AN IDIOT). 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. Twenty years on from release I must acknowledge that, for a classic multiplayer game, Perfect Dark now suffers from a fairly major fault.
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