Image: Xbox Game Studios

The long-awaited reboot of the Perfect Dark shooter series looks worth the wait.

Developers The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics are finally ready to show off their long-awaited reboot of the classic shooter series Perfect Dark. During the Xbox Games Showcase, we got a first look at gameplay for Perfect Dark and a glimpse at its spy thriller story campaign. 

Watch the trailer below:

Xbox shows off gameplay for its Perfect Dark reboot

Xbox first announced its Perfect Dark reboot all the way back in 2020, but it looks like this game might be worth the long wait. Secret agent Joanna Dark returns for a new adventure set in near-future Cairo, featuring a mix of action, parkour and stealth gameplay. While the game clearly borrows elements from the original Perfect Dark games, it’s otherwise charting its own path with a new story and world. 

You will still play as a secret agent in a single player story, however - that much has stayed the same. Players will be given different ways to complete a set of missions, using Joanna’s many traversal abilities and gadgets to manoeuvre around levels in any way they wish. Picture a more sci-fi-leaning take on Dishonored, and you might not be too far off. 

The story follows Joanna Dark, an agent for DataDyne. Her world has been impacted by a series of environmental disasters called the Cascade, which have rendered parts of the planet completely inhospitable to human life. The hypercorporation Core Mantis has stepped in to restore ecological balance by creating walled cities, a move which is soon mimicked by other hypercorporations worldwide. However, their motives are not exactly altruistic. 

Joanna enters Cairo in the near-future to find and apprehend a man named Daniel Carrington. Upon entering his hideout, however, Carrington infiltrates her AR system and exposes secrets surrounding the inner workings of Cairo. Can Carrington be trusted? Who knows. 

The trailer gives us a glimpse of a few of Joanna’s spy gadgets, too. We see her use a gadget to analyse the voices of NPCs and create deepfakes to trick security systems and create distractions. She can also scan NPCs and learn information about them, and obviously, she has a gun that she uses to shoot people. Ideally, you’d be able to get by unseen in this line of work, but that doesn’t always happen. 

Perfect Dark does not have a release date. Check out more announcements and trailers from Xbox Games Showcase 2024 here.