Shooters were my least favorite genre of video games back in the N64 and PS1 days. I started playing them just when PC games began to fully embrace mouse aim; leaving their console counterparts feeling especially clumsy. Perfect Dark is definitely a victim of this history as well. Yet despite its limitations, Rare managed to produce an incredible game. I now regret sleeping on this back when it first came out.
It's immediately obvious that Perfect Dark is building on the groundwork laid out by Rare's own Goldeneye. The spiritual bond between these two games extends beyond just systems and code though.
Players take control of Joanna Dark; an elite operative working for the semi-secret Carrington Institute. She excels at marksmanship and stealth, is incredibly adaptable, and has an assortment of high-tech gadgets—not unlike Mr. Bond. When the institute receives a distress call from a scientist claiming that he is being forced into helping the DataDyne corporation with something unethical, Joanna is dispatched to rescue the poor man. That this doctor then turns out to be a sentient AI is but the first of many surprises.
The story campaign is shorter than that of Goldeneye, but way more cinematic and involved. In many ways, it feels a generation ahead of its time. Cutscenes are well-directed and fully-voiced, with some remarkably good acting to boot. Certainly a step up from Donkey Kong 64, which only managed a single voiced cutscene at the start of the game before switching back to text. The story also finds a good middle-ground between mystery and comedy. It's a genuinely interesting plot full of conspiracies, twists, and betrayals, but with fun characters and weird comedy sprinkled throughout. A perfect fit for Joanna, who quickly endears herself to players with her charming wit and confidence.
Controls do remain a stumbling block, but less so than usual. Perfect Dark again offers an assortment of different control schemes—including some that utilize 2 controllers at once—but each is going to require some compromise. Sharing camera and movement duties between the joystick and C-buttons is an awkward proposition no matter how you configure it. Alongside other issues, such as my control scheme mapping reloading and interacting to the same button. Often leaving me frantically opening and shutting doors instead of letting me reload.
Great efforts are made to compensate for these shortcomings though. Just like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark has an auto-aim feature. Joanna will aim at any enemy on the screen for you, so you need only shoot, reload, and maneuver. That may sound overpowered, but they found a good balance for it where you still need to do enough yourself. The auto-aim only kicks in when enemies are sufficiently centered in your view, so it's not just a case of holding down the button and watching everything die. You'll also have to manually aim when trying to take out faraway enemies, land headshots, or use weapons with scopes. Something which mercifully feels more doable now thanks to the tweaked sensitivity settings.
A major concern of mine going into Perfect Dark is that it would also inherit Goldeneye's worst habits. This turned out to not be the case though, much to my genuine surprise.
My biggest qualm with Goldeneye was that its levels were oversized and often maze-like, with objectives scattered about illogically and endlessly respawning enemies. A favorite example of mine being that the key to a door you're meant to open is held by a random enemy on the other end of the map. Where even if you do find that one specific guy, there's a major risk that you won't even notice him even dropping the thing.
Perfect Dark is a very different beast. It still has a degree of exploration and freedom, but the levels have a much more coherent path to them. The objectives are also sensible and nowhere near as hard to find. The few times I did miss one, it was usually obvious where I should backtrack to or a quick glance at the mission briefing would provide the vital clue.
Perfect Dark also keeps the difficulty-based objectives. If you play the game on Agent, your missions are slimmed down to a number of core objectives while some areas that are now useless are closed off to you. Replay them on a higher setting and now you have more tasks to concern yourself with. And since so many of Goldeneye's annoyances have been purged from Perfect Dark, replaying these missions is now actually a proposition I'd consider.
I was also impressed with some of the smaller innovations that Perfect Dark offers. Its main menu is entirely diegetic, for example. You can click it away and start exploring Carrington Institute at your leisure, talk with characters, or run through the tutorials. Those cutscenes are mighty impressive, but they're also skippable. A rarity in an age where developers were eager to show off the hard work that went into making them. The enemies are also very impressive. They have a lot of different voice lines and behaviors depending on what's happening to them. They might get spooked and run off, they scramble for weapons when they're unarmed, and some NPCs might surrender to you.
Hell we haven't even talked about the multiplayer and the bots. Both of which are fantastic additions that, for many, had Perfect Dark replace Goldeneye outright as their go-to shooter to play with friends. Or alone, I suppose. Now that doing so is possible.
So is Perfect Dark truly perfect? Well we've already touched on the controls, so that's already technically a no. Besides that though, there are some other irksome qualities. The selections of weapons is broad, but there's a lot of overlap between them. With most of the actually useful weapons being some variant of a (semi)-auto rifle with a sizable clip or a highly-accurate pistol. Weapons do have alt-fire modes, but these vary in actual usefulness. Some objectives still feel gimmicky in ways that feel unfair and enemies do still spawn in from impossible places. Sometimes even spawning basically on top of you and immediately doing a ton of damage.
As much as I like its story, you do kinda need to read the briefings because the cutscenes alone skip a lot of information. You finish one mission and suddenly you're somewhere else entirely without much of a transition. The cutscenes also lack subtitles, making the game less accessible to those with hearing issues. Rude given that these were a stable presence in prior Rare games.
Even if Perfect Dark has its blemishes though, these are small issues compared to the game's overall achievements. Not to mention how fun it is to play and replay. It's an amazing showcase for what the Nintendo 64 was capable of. Made even more remarkable when you consider it's a shooter, which the console was notoriously ill-suited for. I went into the game prepared to be disappointed, only to walk away as a fan. so unless the control issues are a definite dealbreaker for you, I implore you to give Perfect Dark a try.
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