It seems like it's taken an eternity to happen, but classic Nintendo 64 FPS Perfect Dark is finally available on Xbox LIVE Arcade for the Xbox 360. With spruced up 1080p visuals, a slick frame rate and eight-player online multiplayer, this is without a doubt the best version of the game to date, but just how well has the shooter aged in the 10 years since its original release? While there are certainly some areas that modern gamers will find hard to tolerate, Perfect Dark offers considerable bang for your 800 Microsoft Points and a huge dose of nostalgia.
As in GoldenEye, missions can be tackled in three ways: agent, special agent and perfect agent. Each of these difficulty settings introduces new objectives that need to be achieved, so while agent might require you to do little more than flick a switch and get to the end of the level, the latter two options require much more roaming around in order to complete all the objectives. Playing on the most basic agent difficulty should be for beginners only as you end up missing out on more than half the game's objectives and the levels themselves end up feeling really small due to the lack of exploration.
What isn't so great is how the game design hasn't been touched. A problem for some gamers will be the complete lack of map and objective markers. Level designs were great back in the day, but now the samey corridors make navigation somewhat of a pain, and it's easy to get a bit lost. You'll frequently have to complete numerous tasks to achieve a single objective, but the game gives you no information on how close you are to doing this, nor does it give you any indication as to where you need to be heading. Combine this with instant mission failure if you accidentally kill or destroy an item key to an objective, and no mid-mission checkpoints, and some gamers will certainly feel more than a little annoyed during their time with the game.
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