Digital Foundry Breaks Down Xbox’s Impressive Perfect Dark Showcase

Joanna Dark is back!

by Ben Kerry 14h ago

The Xbox Games Showcase this year was full of neat surprises, and one of them was the reappearance of Xbox’s Perfect Dark Reboot. Coming out of The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics, Joanna Dark’s return is looking rather splendid, and the team at Digital Foundry has now given their techy take on the game’s new trailer.

In general, the DF team thinks the game looks “highly promising” so far, praising its strong direction, use of physics-based interactions during gameplay and the developer’s implementation of some new-gen graphics techniques.

“I appreciate the fruit being destroyed and the beautiful powder unleashed by an exploding fire extinguisher, and I really hope we see more interactables like this. Of course, with this demo being mostly stealth focused up until this point, I’m also curious what their plans are for enemy behavior – this is a huge part of any similar game.

The game also seems to be using the full suite of Unreal Engine 5 techniques. What looks like Lumen can be spied from the rich indirect lighting in areas like the darkened alleys early in the trailer or the hallways later.”

Despite a positive take overall, the analysis does note that this showing looked early in development, and contained some rough spots and frame rate drops. That’s to be understood for a game that doesn’t even have a release window though, with both DF and ourselves just happy that the game exists and we have a better idea about how it plays.

“Overall, I’m just happy that the game really exists and they’ve found a coherent vision for it. Given the lack of an announced release date, I suspect we’ll be waiting for quite a long time before Perfect Dark is ready.”

Perfect Dark is coming to Xbox Series X|S, PC and Game Pass sometime in the future – and once we have a more specific launch window we’ll of course update you on the game’s release.

What do we think, PXers, reason to be excited for Perfect Dark? Tell us your thoughts down below.

[source eurogamer.net]

Ben is a News Writer at Pure Xbox, and is a fan of action, racing and straight-up shootin’ in any Xbox game he can get his hands on. When he’s not clutching an Xbox controller like his life depends on it, Ben spends his time listening to music that’s far too old for him, watching football on the telly and probably eating somewhere.

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