The game is broken down into missions wherein Joanna starts out with an objective or two and uncovers more based on the difficulty setting. That's it-really-there's nothing else to see. Joanna's big innovations are that she can dual wield, she can hide behind cover, and she has a nifty spin roll move for getting out of tight spaces. The gameplay is a little better-although it does nothing to distinguish itself from the shelves and shelves of "me too" FPSs gathering dust at the local EB Games. When you yearn for Seagal, things are bad. Characters come and go, plot twists are presented then never resolved, the dialogue is laughably bad, and the whole thing made me yearn for a Steven Seagal movie to end my pain. The story is so ludicrous and stupid it's not even worth getting into. Players who tackle the single-player mode will find themselves in the shoes of Joanna Dark, a woman who has deadly gunfights while dressing in clothes that would have made her a raver-if raves were still cool. The things this game does now aren't innovative at all and are barely worthy of having the term "next gen" put next to them. However, the game now shows up to the party late-and worse still, in a dress that went out of fashion years ago. Back in those days, console FPSs hadn't made the huge strides in terms of playability that they have now, and a game like Rare's would have been a decent excursion into the realm of run-and-gun gameplay. Had PD0 released five years ago, it would have probably been better received. Unfortunately, I'm one of those guys who would rather play an offline game than an online one (particularly when it comes to a first person shooter), so I'm more disappointed than anything with this title. Perfect Dark Zero is really a tale of two games on one disc-a single player offline mode so boring and banal that slogging through it is barely worth the effort and an online mode that is really fun. It took Rare a whole console generation to do it, but PD0 is that game-and the wait wasn't really worth it. The game achieved cult status (not quite on par with Goldeneye, but in the same ballpark), and gamers eagerly anticipated a sequel. Like Goldeneye, the original Perfect Dark was a great game showing that FPSs could be done on the home consoles without a mouse and keyboard configuration. PD0 is a sequel to Perfect Dark-a much loved first person shooter that was released on the Nintendo 64. Neither game has proven to be a system seller like Halo. Rare brought two titles to the 360 launch-the moderately entertaining Kameo and greatly anticipated Perfect Dark Zero (PD0). With no Halo 3 on the horizon, wowing early adopters fell squarely onto the shoulders of Rare-the company MS acquired from Nintendo a few years ago. Since MS got it right the first time, I had high hopes for the 360 launch line-up-hopes that have mostly been misplaced based on my experience with the library. Microsoft (MS) bucked the trend as well when they launched the first Xbox-thanks in no small part to Halo, which was the console's one "must play" game for what seemed like two years. There have been exceptions-the Dreamcast launched back in the late '90s with a few good games (and one great one in the form of the original Soul Calibur), and the N64 had Mario 64, but most console launch line-ups look more like the lackluster stuff that came out with the PS2 than what Sega brought to the table. Early in a console's lifecycle, the potential of the platform is apparently as important as what there is to play on it. Looking back over the years, most of the major console launch line-ups have been pretty abysmal-but this hasn't stopped each new console released from selling like hotcakes right out of the gate. Console launches are funny things-for the most part, early adopters run out and drop bucketloads of money on new systems not because there's a killer game they have to play, but because they need to have the newest toy before everyone else on the block.
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