Perfect is its name, and thats the game. From the most intelligent developers to date !!
Upon starting the game you notice the game is personalised where you can create your own save file name. Immediately you’re made to feel like an agent; you’re placed within the Carrington Institute where you can wonder about at your own leisure to explore different rooms where you find training for combat and a weapons firing range amongst other things – brilliant!
The solo missions are perfectly thought out, following a good story line to keep you fully immersed. A nice cut-scene introduces you to the game. Straight away you’re in the thick of the action with a hoard of guards to take out in the first level; you can try a covert approach but it wont get you far. The entire story continues in the same vein, with multiple objectives and cool things to do. There are plenty of levels to play. Joanna Dark, you, is a serious female agent and adds to the serious-feel of the game; some games since have been said to be too “cartoony”. The difficulty is just right, you can choose from three settings; the hardest setting letting you play all objectives and levels.
There is always the drive to succeed in this game and plenty of carrots are dangled in your face with bonus un-lockable items, such as extra levels and cheats; adding yet more to the game. The options and bonuses seem endless and will keep you occupied for a very long time, making the game worth its top asking price in its day.
You’ll never get bored. The Combat simulator lets you hone your skills; you can either work your way through the increasingly difficult challenges or go into a combat arena with or without your friends, but always with the option of having a plentiful supply of simulants (sims). Here is where you can create your own player, again making you feel the need to achieve by keeping a tally of your statistics and player ranking – hundreds of characters to choose from, be it an agent or an Alien. This for me is the best part of the game and will keep you going for… ever! There's plenty of levels to choose from with a variety of styles; one small drawback is the lack of a huge open level. The game obviously descends from Golden Eye (GE) (another N64 classic) and you will see three levels taken from there – also note you can get your hands on the weapons from GE too.
AI – the Artificial Intelligence of the simulants was the best of its time, even today its had to beat, there are several difficulty of sims, Meat Sim to Dark Sim. The harder sims are crafty and keep you on your toes at all times.
This brings me onto weapons. There is a huge selection of cool different weapons, with the added secondary function; for example your Superdragon (machine gun) doubles up as a semi-automatic machine gun with added grenade launcher. There are more obscure and imaginative weapons too for you to find. Out of ammo? – never fear because you can steal a gun of an opponent and shoot him, how cool is that?
Is there a better game engine yet? PD is put together with a very useable control system; the game engine allows super fast movements and dead-eye control, you will soon become a sharp shooter. Your ability to run around the 3D levels, walking off ledges (not possible in GE) and sneaking about make this a truly immersive experience. The game-play is near perfect and games have learnt from this and concentrated on the game engine.
One down point is the graphics, but only slightly. Rare obviously made the right decision to compromise graphics to achieve a much smoother gameplay etc. You can only get so much out of an N64. The graphics appear angular and colours slightly dull; but for an N64 they’re brilliant, you cannot compare this system with a PC game of its time such as Quake. On the odd occasion, during explosions, you can get a slow down in frame rate, you get used to it and compensate by using less sims with explosives.
Be sociable. You can play all the story missions again with a friend, thats right, two player co-opertaive & counter. Also you can obviously have four of you playing in the combat simulator, superb fun.
If you don’t own this game or even a Nintendo 64, and you’re a FPS fan, you should buy the whole package. The game should go down in history as one of the best games of its time; there’s still a strong following of fans to the game – for good reason. Four years on and I still play it, unable to find a game to replace it, but why try to replace it, just simply add this game to you collection.
PD pushed the N64 to its limits, a Perfect compromise between graphics & game-play!