I’ve never played the originalPerfect Dark, nor do I particularly care for first-person shooters, so the extended disappearance ofits remakewasn’t a tragedy for me. The Initiative’s plan to remake the game was officially announced in 2021, but its game director left just months later, some Embracer Group-related things happened, and everybody figured the game was done for.
I don’t think anybody was expecting a trailer for Perfect Dark to be shown off at theXboxGames Showcase, let alone for that trailer to be as cool as it was.
Perfect Dark Is No Longer Just A First-Person Shooter
The first Perfect Dark game released on the Nintendo 64, and was, necessarily, pretty basic. There was a single-player mode with a series of missions, and a couple of multiplayer options. Gameplay mostly consisted of shooting your way through levels and collecting ammo, with some use of gadgets.
I figured a reboot would take these mechanics and expand on them, but the trailer we were shown gave us far more than I ever expected it would. The game is leaning hard into the spy fantasy inherent in the series, and it’s giving me everything I could possibly want. The reboot now incorporates lots of cool parkour and immersive sim elements, making it look almost reminiscent of Thief or Dishonored.
The Use Of Gadgets Is A Thousand Times More Compelling
However, you’ll notice I’m not comparing it to either of those games in my headline, but insteadWatch Dogs. It looks like gadgets and stealth play a very heavy part in this game, which is why I immediately thought of Ubisoft’s tech-centric series, especiallyLegion.
Watch Dogs is a series very obviously centered on technology and how it could be used in a dystopia. You can use whatever tech you have on hand to finish your mission in whatever way works for you, and Perfect Dark’s gameplay trailer reminded me of that.
We see Joanna Dark speaking to someone, presumably through an earpiece, and recording a ‘voiceprint’ of a guard to later use to unlock a voice-activated gate. She scans display monitors and processes information through some kind of augmented reality headset that captures the documents she’s looking at. The futuristic take on tech, beyond the dated spy gadgetry of the earlier games, feels closer to Watch Dogs than any other game I can imagine.
Could Perfect Dark Be As Flexible As Hitman?
Because if it is, boy, do we have a hit on our hands. The vague wording of the trailer’s mission gives me hope: the objectives displayed are simply “go to Carrington’s last known location”, “find a way inside”, “find Carrington”, “investigate the hideout”, and so on. There’s no hand-holding, no ‘do this OR do this’, and no pointed sub-objectives; there’s only the next step.
I couldn’t help but think of Hitman’s missions, where your only goal is to kill a target and exfiltrate successfully. How you do that is your business, and the game rewards you for assassinating your target in specific ways without telling you how to do it.
The game is still fairly far out from release – the trailer didn’t give us a window – but considering the gameplay looks so polished, I can’t imagine it’ll betoolong. If Perfect Dark manages to tie in its frenetic parkour, compelling gadget use, and brutal combat with the flexibility and player agency of Hitman, I can’t imagine I’ll want to play anything else for a good long while. I didn’t care about Perfect Dark a week ago, but I sure do now.
