The Nintendo 64 is a video game console that has a large number of jewels in its catalogue, many of which are considered to be among the best of their time and even rank high on lists of the best games in history. Even though I didn't own a Nintendo 64, I was able to play some of these games thanks to a friend who did, however the game I'll tell you about today, I was able to play thanks to emulators (thank God for emulators). And I could play one of the best games of the FPS genre, considered as a "spiritual sequel" of the classic 007 N64.
Today's Retro Review is about: Perfect Dark.
The story of this game is quite interesting, very much in the style of a spy movie, with lots of mystery, action, betrayal and plot twists. The story begins by introducing us to a company called dataDyne, which according to information sources, has managed to have contact with extraterrestrial beings, and because of this there have been many disappearances of people for some time. That is why a protection agency called "Carrington Institute", which has many suspicions about this company, besides they believe that there could be a much bigger conspiracy, decides to send one of their best agents: Joanna Dark, who due to her excellent skills and achievements at the Carrington Institute, has been assigned the name "Perfect Dark". The mission of this agent is to enter the dataDyne company and she will have to rescue Doctor Caroll, who is being threatened by this company and who has a lot of information about what they plan to do with the alien race. And so we are presented with this excellent game, which will have to perform many missions of infiltration, espionage, obtaining an object or murder.
Perfect Dark is one of the best graphics games in the entire Nintendo 64 catalogue and one of those games, which after many years still looks really good. Perfect Dark is a quite futuristic game, so we are going to see very often this kind of style, a very cyberpunk style, a genre that is very present in many videogames nowadays. As I mentioned before, this videogame is considered as a "spiritual sequel" of 007 of N64, and that can be seen in the way our enemies and our own character move, that kind of movement so characteristic that we could see in the Agent Bond game, is very similar, not to say that it is practically the same that we will be able to see in Perfect Dark. They're pretty fluid moves, which help a lot with the gameplay. Although in Perfect Dark you can notice a great improvement in this aspect.
Perfect Dark makes good use of the lighting and light effects, being able to create a quite unique atmosphere in the scenarios, many of the light effects are quite realistic and that adds a lot to the style and charisma that this game presents. There is a lot of variety in the scenarios, each one of them decorated in such a way that by the standards of the time this video game came out, it was quite an impressive thing to see, and even if we look at it from a current perspective, considering all the graphic advance that there is in video games, it is still quite impressive to see and what they were able to achieve with this title.
The soundtrack of Perfect Dark is very good, very much in line with their style and genre, a soundtrack that consists of 36 melodies, so we have about 2 hours of music to listen. Many of the tunes will remind us of the classic tunes of spy and infiltration movies, they already keep me that tone of mystery and suspense, there will also be the classic tunes for the action moments, in general terms, it is a soundtrack to match. But if we talk about sound aspects, I think that sound effects play a better role in this videogame, since you can hear strong and realistic sound effects, shooting sound effects and even much lighter sound effects, it gives a quite accurate level of realism to Perfect Dark.
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As I mentioned before, Perfect Dark is an FPS with the same mechanics as N64's GoldenEye, but I consider that Perfect Dark improved a lot this kind of characteristic gameplay and that it is considered as one of the best in its genre and also quite innovative for its time.
In Perfect Dark we must fulfill several missions throughout the game, missions of all kinds, infiltration, espionage and murder, always using the skills and weaponry that our protagonist has at his disposal. The gameplay of Perfect Dark is very comfortable, quite dynamic and extremely fun. Also it has several game modes, we can play in multiplayer with friends, fighting against them or fulfilling some mission in cooperation, there is also a simulation mode, that in the same way we can perform certain missions, this game mode serves as training and in a way made me remember the VR mode of Metal Gear Solid of the PS1. We have a large arsenal of weapons of all kinds that will serve us in certain situations. In some missions, the ones I like the most, we have to infiltrate certain places without being detected, you could say that Perfect Dark is an almost perfect combination of GoldenEye and Metal Gear Solid. In general the gameplay of Perfect Dark is very addictive, one of the best FPS ever made and very rarely given the credit it really deserves.
Perfect Dark is one of the undisputed jewels of video games, an FPS with fun and very dynamic mechanics, with several entertaining game modes. In short, a spectacular game.
