The Operative: No One Lives Forever

The Good
Ok, let me get this out of the way first: the level "Unexpected Turbulence" is one of the coolest levels I have ever played in any shooter to date. If you played the game, you know what I mean; if you did not, I will not spoil it more than I already have. This level probably raises the game rating some 3 or 4 points all by itself...

In general, this is a very good "spy action movie" shooter. The hero kills lots of bad guys, saves lots of innocent people, has tons of weapons and gadgets to use and looks good during the whole process (but, in this case, the hero is a woman, as you probably knew). Some of the action sequences are quite unbelievable and the bad guys are very much over the top, bordering goofy. All in all, reread this paragraph and you will realize that the game is just like an old James Bond movie.

Gameplay sometimes favors stealth over force, what keeps you thinking about how to deal with the different levels. The huge number of weapons and gadgets are wisely introduced during the game a few at a time in pre-mission briefings. AI is fairly good: enemies look for cover (sometimes a bit too much) and often run for help or try to sound alarms instead of taking you by themselves.

The graphics are fine for the game. They are a bit too clean, mostly, but the same can be said for some other outstanding games (like Half-Life). When textures are really necessary (grassy ground, mountains, etc.), they look good enough. The environments do have quite some variation: snowy Europe, tropical landscapes, urban sights, underwater searches, etc.

Sound is mostly excellent: the music is very 60s and the tempo follows the action very nicely. Sound effects are good and varied. Voice talent is also good enough (not stellar), but the scripts are really good. In particular, many unimportant characters have in-level conversations that I almost always stopped to listen (sometimes this stop would even make my mission harder...) -- these dialogues ranged from vaguely amusing to very funny. One of them sounds just like I do when teaching Statistics and got me laughing aloud ("Correlation is NOT causation!").

The Bad
As mentioned above, voice acting could be better. Also, the cutscenes that are done with the game engine itself are well scripted, but the movements of the models during such cutscenes could be improved -- there is a lot of repetition and not a lot of expression from the model faces.

Some nitpicking: while it is nice that the music speeds up and gets louder whenever action is going on on the screen, sometimes it would be TOO loud. I often lowered music volume just so I could hear what was going on during the action... but then the music would be VERY feeble out of the action. I guess this little annoyance actually comes from the fact that I LIKED the music and I wanted to hear it, but it would be nice to have two controls for music volume: "action" mode and "non-action" mode.

I was somehow expecting more from story and environments... On the other hand, it is probably just me -- I have just played "Wheel of Time", and the story and world there are so interesting that N.O.L.F. probably lost a couple of marks there.

But, really, I really did not like the plot ending. Too much happens in too little time, and it feels contrived... This was probably done intentionally, but I wished they had held it a bit. Even James Bond movies are not THAT goofy at the end.

The Bottom Line
A good shooter with character and plot.

The Good
Great, colorful, varied graphics; interesting, innovative fresh and generally brilliant missions; original and very interesting level design; fantastic character models; interesting, and pretty complex story with lots of interesting characters; fantastic weapons and gadgets; very good voice acting and sound in general; a lot of comic relief, jokes, and funny situations and dialogue in general; a breath of fresh air in a market full of clones;

The Bad
Some hard missions involving stealth elements and superhumanly acute guards; some slowdowns;

The Bottom Line
A brilliant, innovative, original, funny, fresh, interesting and polished first person shooter with a great story and fantastic gameplay.

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.