The Operative: No One Lives Forever

The Good
This is the first time in years that I have been so engrossed in a game single-player campaign. The average shooter right now pretty much works like this: Walk into a warehouse, shoot all the bad guys, walk back out, walk down the street to the next warehouse, and so on. No One Lives Forever lets you explore a beautifully detailed variety of locations including night clubs, hotels, exotic countries, airplanes, sunken ships, and even a space station! And the best part of all these neat locations is what you'll get to do inside them, such as where you jump out of the plane to steal the parachute on a diver below. Between each mission you'll get very well-done, in-engine cutscenes that advance the story, give you your briefing, and, most of the time, are really quite hilarious. Plus, No One Lives Forever has one of the best, most fitting soundtracks I have every heard in a game! This is the kind of game that literally makes hours seem like minutes!

The Bad
There's only one complaint I have about this game, and that is the multi-play. While it is definitely above average, it doesn't quite compare to the online play found in other shooters.

The Bottom Line
A funny, classy, incredibly fun game that no gamer should be without.

The Good
First things first, daddyo. How 'bout we deep six the annoying hippie jargon, ok? Ok, that's better. The thing is, NOLF makes you want to talk like that. While it's nowhere near that far over the top in practice--for one thing, its take is British, not American--it just exudes '60's style to the point that you want to lose yourself in the spirit of the era. You might say that NOLF is to the '60's what Interstate '76 was to the '70's, only more so.

It is perhaps no accident that NOLF was published by Fox Interactive, which has one foot in the movie industry. Those connections really show here, as the writing, the animation work, the sound effects, the music--everything--is top notch all the way. The player really becomes British secret agent Cate Archer, and is made to feel as if he or she is actually starring in a '60's era Bond-style action movie, complete with hilarious side plots and dialogue. Indeed, half the fun of playing, even though you're nominally the main character, is listening to what the "nobodies"--the extras--around you are saying. This is not throw-away stuff. It's really, really good and really, really funny. As you proceed through the game, you will find yourself initiating conversations with NPC's you'd never give a second thought to in other games just to see what they'll say. More often than not, they'll have you laughing.

As for the gameplay, it's mostly standard fare, although there are some fun twists. In true FPS fashion, you run, jump, and sneak through levels using a variety of weapons and clever special objects (such as poison barettes, robotic poodles, and a ton of other neat gadgets I don't want to spoil by preannouncing). However, many of the levels offer special treats, such as the opening scene, in which you have to dispatch a bevy of Moroccan assassins who are after the hilariously deaf American ambassador to their country. This amounts to simply standing at a window and picking them off as quickly as you can, Duck Hunt-style, but the whole riff is wonderful, and turns out to be a great way to start off the game. In another scene, you must jump from a plane without a parachute, and nail all the bad guys on the way down. This is much easier said than done, but again, the novelty of the scene makes it into much more than just another level.

NOLF is, quite simply, a triumph of writing, acting, and gameplay in the interactive genre. It has no peer in this regard. Even other highly regarded games like System Shock II and Thief must bow to its superior artistry...and I don't say that lightly, as I am a huge fan of both of these. (I do not, however, mean to say that NOLF is in every way a better game than all the rest. I simply mean that the quality of the ingredients is, in the main, higher all around. It must remain for each individual player to judge how successfully the parts have been made into a whole.)

The Bad
My biggest frustration with NOLF has to be the control scheme, or more specifically, the lack of a couple of controls I've come to regard as essential. The first is the ability to lean. In a game that involves sneaking around as much as this one does, it seems inconceivable to me that such a function would be omitted, but it has been. What you have to do instead is pop out from behind corners for a brief second, and then pop back. The designers have tried to make this the functional equivalent of leaning, by making the bad guys not notice you until you've been exposed for more than a second or so, but in practice it is very unintuitive and clumsy. Moreover, it means that when you shoot you always have to have your whole body exposed to the enemy. In first- or second-generation shooters, such things might have been acceptable, but after games like Thief the rules changed forever. I just wish Monolith had realized that.

The second fatal omission is the ability to toggle crouch mode. There is a crouch function, which can be assigned to any key you want, but it still only works for as long as you press the key. Once you let go of the key, your character stands up. Why is this a big deal? Because a) just as in Thief, you make less noise while crouching and can often slip by enemies this way, and b) available cover may be only waist-high, requiring you to squat to take advantage of it. The problem is, since you can't lean around corners, you will often need to crouch and move either laterally or forward and backward at the same time, which turns out to be a very tough thing to do no matter where you assign the crouch key.

Beyond these not insignificant shortcomings, my only complaint is with NOLF's somewhat convoluted and confusing menu system, which on the one hand seems hardly worth mentioning, but in the interest of full disclosure should be acknowledged.

The Bottom Line
Playing NOLF is like starring in a big-budget action movie and is loads of fun. It features probably the best acting, and hands down the best dialogue ever heard in a computer game, and it's uproariously funny to boot. While there are a couple of fairly serious control issues, these should not dissuade you from experiencing this gem of a game. Work of this quality simply does not come along every day. It would not, in fact, be too much to call it art.

The Good
Jut finished playing NOLF, almost three years late - but does it really matter? I've found over the years that a good game just doesn't diminish over time. Too bad so few people have the capacity and patience required to judge a game in the context of its relevant timeframe; luckily MobyGames' reviewers include some such enlightened souls.

With that said, simply put, NOLF KICKS ASS! The game engine (LithTech) generally excels at rendering goregous scenes at decent frame-rates. The indoor scenes are most convincing, and the outdoor scenes are great too. The vast variety of form and colour in the game, combined with the continuous excitement of firefights and daring escapes makes for a very intense gaming experience that never bores. One of the worst qualities in recent years' games is their tendency for endless dream-sequences or linear "run from the bad guys" scenes; even the most linear and scripted scenes in NOLF give you a sense of satisfaction, that you've done something rather than watched as something unfolds. In this respect, NOLF compares very favourably to much more highly-praised games such as Max Payne.

The story is cheezy but very suitable for a 60s-esque spy movie. It's not overly ambitious (which, again, compares favourably to Max Payne) though not overly simplistic, unfolds well across the game's timeframe and manages to stay coherent. The game is also accompanied by very well performed, suitably cliché spy movie music, which (almost) never annoys and never gets in the way of the action.

The variety of weapons and gadgets in the game is absolutely astounding! From various semi-automatic pistols to machine guns, sniper rifles, AK-47 and even a long-distance, high-explosive firing sniper riple, this game has it ALL. Although I never found much use for most of the gadgets (being a "shoot first and ask questions later" player), it was nice to have all sorts of gadgets - lock pick, zip-cord, body-removing spray (ha!) and other cool items. The vast amount of weapons is adequately accompanied by a vast diversity of missions, from typical "enter the building and kill everyone" missions to even more typical "protect the ambassador" missions. Some missions involve subtlety and stealth while others require you to go through minefields and remove "obstacles" with the sniper rifle. There're even missions that require you to do some actual thinking: blow up a generator before attempting access through an electrocuted fence, or do some jumping to lower platforms, shooting people from behind instead of using an elevator. Don't get me wrong: the ability to finish a task in one of many ways comes nothing close to Deus Ex, but it is non-too-shabby...

On top of that, the game is absolutely hillarious; sometimes you get to hear the most ridiculous dialogue from your enemies ("Would you like to buy a monkey?"), others you will face some of the craziest situations ever concieved (Igne Wagner boss level, anyone?). Rest of the game you'll be blowing up a gajillion people with gajillion cool guns. What's not to like?

The Bad
There are very few things that I dislike about NOLF; primarily the one mandatory stealth mission, which I just cheated my way out of. I can't STAND stealth. The beautiful thing about Deus Ex is that at no point during the game is anything so utterly scripted that you can't avoid either a gunfight or a stealthy approach. NOLF just isn't as good in that respect.

Also, some parts are far more linear than I would've liked (primarily towards the end of the game).

Other than that, no complaints!

The Bottom Line
An extremely well-executed game with a hell of a lot going for it. Just get it and play it, you won't regret it - that's a promise!