For the reboot, you can expect something slightly more realistic, although it’s not unlikely the aliens will make a comeback – in the trailer, you can already see the headquarters of dataDyne, the main antagonist in the original Perfect Dark. This is a bit much for a spy game in 2020, seeing as the stealth genre as a whole has moved away from sci-fi and towards a gritty sort of realism. Joanna Dark, nicknamed Perfect Dark for her high scores in spy training, gets embroiled in that conflict, which will feature no less than aliens trying to kidnap the president and a plot to destroy the world. Each is represented by a powerful corporation, which uses its resources to do the aliens bidding. In the original, two alien races, called the Maians and the Skedar, have chosen Earth as setting for their conflict. The game’s influences reached from Blade Runner to X-Files and Ghost in the Shell, and it somehow combined the elements of a spy thriller with aliens, sentient AI and secret government weapon projects. It may also be a callback to the original Perfect Dark, which depicted no less than the conflict of two alien races, one of them even looking like those classic grey little men you also see in XCOM. The sci-fi part of Perfect Dark’s eco sci-fi may refer to the ways in which humanity has advanced to meet the new ecological challenge. If done right, this could be an opportunity for Perfect Dark to say something about the very real issue of climate change, which would certainly set it apart from all other FPS games. In this world, giant corporations stepped in to help people adjust to life on a planet that could no longer regulate itself, but the trailer already suggests that these corporations may not selflessly have the good of the people in mind. The first trailer drives that idea home – the voice-over describes increasing natural disasters and shows a giant storm ravaging a city while Joanna watches. Microsoft described the upcoming Perfect Dark as an “eco sci-fi” tale set in the near future. What platforms will Perfect Dark release on? Most games of the complexity Perfect Dark is aiming for take several years from announcement to release – Microsoft itself has only said it’s “looking forward to sharing more about Perfect Dark in the future” – our guess is that Perfect Dark will release 2023 at the earliest – fittingly, the year the original game was set. Developer The Initiative was announced two years ago, and from the interview video, it sounds as if they spent most of those two years with studio setup and idea finding, which eventually led them to Perfect Dark. When is the Perfect Dark release date?Ī Perfect Dark release date hasn’t been revealed yet. Perfect dark actually had another prequel, a top-down Game Boy Color game that was released mere months after the N64 game. Perfect Dark was followed by Perfect Dark Zero in 2005, an Xbox 360 launch title and prequel to the original Perfect Dark that simply couldn’t compete with the original, which was remastered for Xbox 360 in 2010. Even a lot of its gadgets will probably translate to a modern game without no problems. To this day, Perfect Dark stands out not only for the amount of weapons it featured, but how different they felt, and the three difficulty modes played distinctively different, posing a decent challenge for completionists. This was an exciting amount of variety for a game then, and to top it all off Perfect Dark even came with co-op and a multiplayer deathmatch mode reminiscent of that in Goldeneye 007. "I think Joanna offers a lot of modern opportunities that I love to see the team kind of focusing on, having a strong protagonist."Īpart from its large array of different weapons, Perfect Dark also features stealth – to successfully make it through a level, you have to use gadgets such as night-vision goggles and silently approach opponents from behind to disarm them, or even don disguises to get past them undetected.