They say that, in life, you always remember your first love. Could it be that this extends to videogames as well? It’s definitely true that I can never feel as much of an affinity with a game, or a studio, as I did with this FPS masterclass. Nigh on a week of playing time was put into this sci-fi conspiracy adventure; a feat unheard of to my adolescent casual gamer self, and possibly the beginning of the end for me. I just don’t think I’ll ever get over Rare.
For those of you who may be uneducated (and to my horror, I find that there are a few of you heathens out there) Perfect Dark is essentially a polished, futurised Goldeneye. It looks better, it plays better, it feels so much better, but you can never shake the comforting familiarity of it all.
In branching out from the Bond franchise, it enabled Rare to keep hold of everything good about the game, yet relinquish the bad. The enemies are far more sinister and imaginative than Russian Terrorists, the gadgets range from the sublime to the bizarre, and the story is free to develop at its own pace, being penned specifically for this medium.
On Perfect Agent, the hardest difficulty, this game becomes ridiculously addictive. In the days before recharging shields, or an intuitive cover system and with a complete lack of checkpoints, the game could be accused of being criminally unforgiving.
This game really made me feel like a proper spy. Playing through on Perfect Agent difficulty needed some serious skill, and even 8 years on I still count its completion amongst one of my finer gaming achievements (If only Xbox Live had retrospective achievements…) Storming into a room with a Silenced Falcon and dropping four henchmen with as many bullets just as the last one is about to raise the alarm actually made you consider a career change. Interplanetary espionage? Yes please…
The variety of the missions that your thumbs put heroine Joanna Dark through is quite incredible. The need for shadow hugging and silent killing in missions like Chicago: Stealth and Air Base: Espionage can leave you feeling more than a little bit vulnerable if heavy-handedness triggers the alarm, yet facing off wave after wave of Datadyne hacks shielded to the nines in Carrington Institute: Defence seems like a valiant defiance in the face of overwhelming odds. The same engine, the same AI, just excellent mission design stretching this engine to completely different ends.
