Howdy peeps and welcome to Day #28 of Month of Nostalgic Video Game Reviews 2! This is a blog series where I review video games from my childhood. Today’s game is one that provided me with many occasions of fun and arguments with my friends, I am of course talking about Perfect Dark!
Perfect Dark was a first-person shooter game developed by Rare for the N64 and released in 2000. This game is owned considered to be the spiritual sequel to GoldenEye 007 due to it also being developed by Rare and using a modified version of the game engine that powered GoldenEye.
Perfect Dark featured a single-player mode consisting of seventeen missions in which the player assumes the role of special agent Joanna Dark, an operative for the fictional Carrington Institute, as she attempts to stop a conspiracy by rival corporation dataDyne.
The game was a first-person shooter game and like many games of the genre it included a range of weapons to collect, enemies to defeat and varied environments to explore. This game shared many similarities to GoldenEye 007 in the sense that the gameplay was very similar in terms of the ability to use stealth and tackle objectives that vary with the difficulty setting (in this case there were four). You have the choice to try out a number of tutorials and training activities by exploring the Carrington Institute, which acts as the game’s central hub. The most substantial of these activities is the firing range, in which you’re proficiency with each of the game’s weapons is tested against specific targets.
The game boasted a great deal of weapons to choose from, 30 to be exact and all of them featured various individual features that were balanced but not overpowered and the weapons ranged from modern stuff to more futuristic ones.
The game’s multiplayer mode was Combat Simulator. Game’s could be played with up to four human players and eight computer-controlled players and if more than one human was playing then the in split-screen. is used if more than one human is playing. If three or four humans play, the screen is divided into quarters, with one quarter left blank if necessary. Players enter the game unarmed and with a certain amount of health. Weapons and ammunition are scattered around the level in preset positions. Once a player is killed, they are regenerated elsewhere in the level, once again unarmed. The overall objective of the game is determined by the scenario being played.
Ah Perfect Dark, if it wasn’t GoldenEye 007 that everyone was going on about when it comes to FPS games then it was this game instead. Perfect Dark is one of the finest FPS games of its time, everyone goes on about GoldenEye 007 like it was the only FPS on the N64, sure it changed the way we looked at FPS game and set the foundation for all games that followed it. But Perfect Dark took was good about GoldenEye and upgraded it by ten times, this was a much tighter and more layered experience. If you had a N64 it was mandatory for you to own this game and while I never owned the game myself I went over to my school mate’s house and played it all the damn time. As with most FPS games I mainly played them for the multiplayer and that’s exactly what I did with this game. OH MY GOD! Perfect Dark had one of the greatest multiplayer modes of any game I’d ever played, it was deep, customizable and fun as hell. James Bond session were good, but this was on another level! The games I had with my mates were incredible, we’d always customize things beforehand which kept matches interesting. We either played individually or in teams and if we were in teams me and my mate would always be aliens and it was just kick ass.
These aliens were the best!
So in conclusion Perfect Dark had a great gameplay along with a fine single-player mode, an epic multiplayer and wonderful presentation. If you missed this game back in the day try and get a hold of it and play it, either on the original N64 or on Xbox Live Arcade fi you’re an Xbox 360 owner. Honestly this is a great game and you’d be foolish to miss out on this killer FPS game and this is coming from a person who really doesn’t like the genre that much.
Well there’s another game review done only 2 more to go! If you have experiences with this game or any of the following ones do comment below! I’ll see ya tomorrow with another nostalgic video game review yo! 😀
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