The Psychosis Gun converts enemies to your cause. Assault rifles can turn into proximity mines (Dragon) or be turned on their sides as handy grenade launchers (Superdragon). The laptop gun is all about sleek chrome and efficiency, perfectly exemplified when you toss it away and it begins acting as a sentry gun. The RCP-90 is the most powerful automatic weapon in the game, and comes bundled with a cloaking device.

Some weapons are there just for the hell of it, like the nerve grenade that turns fourplayer splitscreen into a black-and-blue smeary mess, or the perfect recreations of GoldenEye guns (with names like PP9i and Klo1313). It’s not just about function, either. This is an FPS for gun fetishists: in place of GoldenEye’s ‘dipping’ reload animations, Perfect Dark is the visual equivalent of tonguing the barrel.

The Cyclone, a svelte curve of metal, whirrs and clunks with each new magazine – the chocolate-orange slabs of ammo feed through its belt, are ruthlessly stripped of their bullets, and fall to the ground empty. There are tremors as a thick clip is slammed into the base of an RCP-90. Alien weapons suck in opalescent blobs with a ’60s Dr Who sound effect, bolts clack into place on anything automatic, and even the humble throwing knife has to be casually tossed in the air and caught with a flourish before use.

Even the bots are in on it. PD calls them ‘sims’ and gives them ‘personalities’. The Preysim looks for recently spawned and weak players. Vengesim blindly hunts the last person to kill it. Judgesim maintains balance by killing the current leader. These have obvious applications, but there are others designed to simply shake things up a
bit. The Peacesim abhors violence, and runs around the level trying to collect weapons and ammo before playerscan get to them. It won’t attack, but get too close and it’ll disarm you. The Fistsim just runs around whacking players – which with PD’s overzealous dizzying effect is very annoying. And the Rocketsim just likes explosions, regardless of its own life.

Like the weapons, these sims were designed for possibilities rather than balance, for play rather than work. For combinations. It’s a miracle that this gallimaufry works at all, never mind that it was one of the greatest fourplayer FPS games of its time.

Almost as an afterthought, the Combat Simulator includes challenges that can be tackled solo or with friends. Usually some kind of objective-based assignment against a sim or team of sims, over 30 missions this mode somehow creeps from embarrassingly easy to not-in-this-lifetime-pal difficulty. Most of the ideas and innovations of the game are in multiplayer, but there are also gems in the underrated singleplayer campaign.