Review  Perfect Dark
- Cooperative Mode
- By Mike Schneider,
-by Andrew Weatherton
, 6.30.00
When Perfect Dark was delayed from December of 1999 to April of 2000 we were
told it was for a few reasons, most notably of which was a cooperative mode.
It was for this reason (and the now debunked “Perfect Head”
face-mapping feature) that I was willing to grin and bear the wait.
During the delay I got my grubby little hands on a little game called
Rainbow 6 by Redstorm (the N64 version of course). Rainbow 6’s cooperative mode was all about teamwork and
barking orders at your friend. It
was in my opinion the best cooperative experience available on any platform (due
to the fact that you and your buddy are in the same room). Perfect Dark’s cooperative mode works in the same way as I
thought it would, but it offers a totally different experience to Rainbow 6.
You won’t find yourself yelling for help or saying, “cover me!”
it’s more two people going through a mission at the same time than it is two
people playing through a mission as a team.
You really don’t worry about how your friend is doing, it’s more like
“you do this and I’ll do that so we get done quicker” than it is
“Alright, let’s storm this room together, you storm left, I’ll storm
right, use your explosives to stun them!”.
It’s just not as much of a teamwork issue. That’s not to say it’s not fun, but it seems as though it
won’t be a very lasting gaming experience, I don’t see myself going back to
beat levels more than once. Perhaps
if you could open cheats I would but there aren’t any to unlock in co-op.
Co-op doesn’t seem to do anything but make the framerate slow (though
still playable for the most part) and the missions easier.
The good news is that the game keeps track of missions beaten in co-op
separately from the solo missions and you can’t use a level on co-op until
you’ve beaten it on solo to prevent cheating.
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Graphical
Comparison: |
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One player mission.
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Cooperative mode. Some detail is lost, but nothing worth crying over.
For example, not much in lighting effects with cooperative mode.
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It’s
worth mentioning that there are some fairly severe gameplay glitches that
arise while using Co-op mode that leads me to believe that this may have been
rushed a tad. In some of the
one-player missions you have to use a disguise in order to sneak into areas of
the level, and in Cooperative mode only one of the players is able to adorn
this disguise. This means that
the level can’t actually be beaten using both players; one must wait around
while the other does the entire mission.
I simply can’t believe that a problem like this made it into the
final copy of the game.
Continue on to the other "Operative Mode", Counter
Operative, on page 9...
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