In the hallowed halls of classic shooters, Perfect Dark hovers in the heavens. A little less than ten years later and Microsoft is mining at our nostalgia and adding online multiplayer, HD resolutions, improved textures and framerates, and you know what, it aint half bad.

The nearly ten year old shooter has you slipping on the British accent of super spy Joanna Dark, embarking on a multitude of missions full of aliens, stealth, gadgets and lots and lots of shooting and lots and lots of guns.
Perfect Dark certainly shows it’s age with a number of things, but starting with the AI having a number of pratfalls, which leads to them sometimes running around like a headless chicken or once they drop their gun, or as I did disarm them, they’ll just stand on the spot asking you not to shoot. Which leads to some hilarity as I and a friend ran through an entire level disarming every guard along the way with not one really putting up a fight once we disarmed them.
The new improved textures look nice, even if they do tend to repeat, with some of the Rare staff providing their own faces to the grunts in the game. If you look out carefully you might see Peter Molyneux running round, so Fable fans that feel like they were lied to by the man, it’s time for your revenge. Most of the time though you’ll just won’t be looking at the new textures, instead however you’ll be looking more upon the cold asymmetric landscape of the maps and the square box hands, which hasn’t been changed/updated for this HD remix.
Speaking of which neither has the design of the game, which can make objectives sometimes seem murky with no waypoints marks or maps to push you in the right direction.
If you can surmount these hurdles you’ll enjoy multi-part goals, a cornball sci-fi script and an armoury of impressive and often useful weapons, such as the wall piercing Far Sight.

While far from perfect, 800 Microsoft points nets you a whole lot of game with over 15 missions, along with several degrees of difficulty that change up objectives. The number of multiplayer options is also staggering with online, splitscreen, bots, challenges, team games, co-op and a degree of tweaking for costume games that is nearly unparalleled.
There’s also a mode called ‘Counter Operative’ where you can spawn as the enemy in someone else’s single player run.
However multiplayer lacks the modern day refinement over the last years, so prepare to lean on auto aim, memorise weapon spawns and feel the cold asymmetric cut of maps as you punch your way to a laptop gun.

With cheats to unlock, multiplayer ranks to climb and new devious no specific crown awards to figure out this blast from the past is still a blast to play as an unevolved envoy of modern day shooters.

7/10