The map design is often smart, with small touches such as Tower’s snow-caked landscape proving ideal for snipers. The options are great, with more traditional modes mixing with outlandish types such as Infection, with those starting infected tasked with killing and infecting any others remaining, turning it into a tense game of cat-and-mouse. For starters, you can add in bots to substitute for real players, and you can tweak their difficulty, behavioural patterns and team placement, proving a lot of fun. Divided into Deathmatch and Dark Ops, with some modes allowing up to 16 players to join, there’s a lot of settings and tweaks which give it longevity. It works well and adds incentive to come back for more.īut really, the highlight of Zero is its multiplayer suite. Co-op returns too though, allowing you to play through the entire game with a friend, and it’s quite inventively implemented for its time, seeing the partner take the role of A.I. The difficulty, though, retains the sharp edge of the previous game, with tough shootouts punctuated by – often – a singular mid-mission checkpoint, depending on the difficulty. It lacks replay value due to this, as most players may tire of slogging through these after a single go. Worse, though, is the confusing level design which had to be patched to include directions, because navigating through a level sometimes felt like a chore without guidance. While optional objectives appear, and more become mandatory once you up the difficulty, they feel like something of an afterthought. The campaign itself is a strange beast, meshing elements of the previous game with a lot of straightforward objectives, at least compared to shooters of this ilk. It’s a disappointing prelude to a story that while far from Oscar-worthy, was still a lot of fun. Lame twists aren’t explored fully, and it mostly serves as an excuse to move Joanna between distinct looking locales. The story is pretty weak, with hammy dialogue and corny characters that feel disconnected from the N64 original. ![]() Working as a bounty hunter with her father and a hacker called Chandra, the team begin to search for a researcher captured by the Hong Kong triad, only to find their exploits spread to a global scale. deficiencies leave you feeling a touch short-changed.Ī narrative prequel to Perfect Dark, Zero follows the earlier exploits of Miss Joanna Dark, in the not too distant future of 2020. Shooting, on the whole, feels weighty and smooth, benefiting from a better frame rate than its N64 counterpart, though some aspects like the awkward cover system, unbalanced roll mechanic and A.I. This means you can often wield only two pistols and an SMG, one rifle and a shotgun or a singular heavy weapon. Weapons come with secondary firing modes, encouraging experimentation, though in a bit of a backwards step, you’re limited in the number of guns you can carry. Jo can dual-wield pistols, plant Laptop assault rifles as turrets and wipe out enemies with the Plasma Rifle. The assortment of weaponry proves a great selling point, with a wide range of armaments ranging from the more traditional to the extraordinary. In 2000, Perfect Dark was lauded for its qualities and some of t hese did tran sition to Zero five years later. ![]() But is there more to it than we remember? In the 15 years since, Zero has instead become something of a punchbag: a warning against over-expectation, a magnet to derision from many players. Rare’s FPS came with excessive hype and would fit within the Xbox 360’s launch window, with many hoping it’d be the killer app that would show what the new generation of hardware was capable of. A long-in-development project from a British studio synonymous with quality. ![]() A leading launch title for a new system and a follow-up to one of the great console shooters.
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