Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Rare
Publisher: Microsoft

Perfect Dark Zero lacks the HDR lighting effects we've grown accustomed to in other 360 games, and the artwork is of inconsistent quality. That said, nearly every surface makes use of shaders, and PDZ effectively brings comic-book style artwork to life, sans cel-shading. To put it another way, when you compare PDZ with an Xbox or PS2 game you can readily appreciate the prowess of Microsoft's latest platform. At the same time though it is not pushing the 360's envelope to be sure.

The voice acting is hit and miss, but the gun sound effects provide some nice punch, and are crystalline in clarity. The game's soundtrack, which is a nice mix of thumping, electric-guitar laden techno, is catchy, memorable, is quite unique coming from a game of this era, where music is generally an afterthought, replaced instead by crummy orchestra renditions. The audio even affects gameplay; in multiplayer, Dolby 5.1 plays a significant role by design because footsteps are especially pronounced.

You can tell a player's amount of remaining armor in PDZ because it gets visually knocked off the player model as they get shot. You can roll in any direction by tapping the left bumper, a move with its own risks and rewards. You are visible in opponent's radars not when you're moving, ala Halo, but while and shortly after you are firing-- useful stealth abilities in deathmatch! All of these gameplay facets, along with the player's relatively slow movement speed, remind me a bit of Unreal when it first came out-- a fresh breath amongst a flood of carbon copy so-called "realistic" shooters.

I haven't had this much fun playing deathmatch in probably five or six years. The maps are simple to grasp but provide enough complexity, the bots are well designed, and the stellar "Dark Ops" mode make this game a winner. The single player campaign is not bad, but it's short, taking only a few hours to conquer. It is teasing in that it whets your imagination with awesome gameplay elements in the first level, and then mostly ignores them through the remainder of the campaign. I did not play the original and so I am unbiased; PDZ is a good game if you like botmatch and are looking for something different from a shooter.