No One Lives Forever: Review + Full Series Retrospective (Replay)
Note: I had previously reviewed the full series back in 2016; you can read the original review here. This review is an updated version that's been largely re-written with updated and expanded thoughts, along with a full video version, seen here.
The Operative: No One Lives Forever and its sequel, No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in HARM's Way, are a series of first-person shooters developed by Monolith Productions
in 2000 and 2002, in which players take the role of 1960s secret agent
Cate Archer trying to stop a villainous criminal organization from
taking over the world. Typical gameplay involves combinations of run-and-gun action as you fight off hordes of enemy henchmen; sneaky stealth action as you try to infiltrate facilities undetected; exploring varied level environments to find hidden intelligence and bonus equipment upgrades; going undercover and mingling with civilians to meet with informants or interview suspects, occasionally even picking dialogue choices; riding vehicles through exotic locations; and watching cutscenes that progressively tell the game's lengthy story as Cate trots the globe to diverse and exotic locations to complete a variety of different objectives en route to saving the day. Both games also feature a strong humorous component with lots of genre-spoofing dialogue and jokes, thus lending them a much more whimsical and lighthearted tone than your typical shooter. Oh, and there's also Contract JACK, a stand-alone spinoff from 2003 that's loosely connected to the series, but uh, there's a reason it's not discussed much when it comes to the NOLF series and is perhaps better forgotten about, but don't worry -- I'll explain why in due time.
Originally PC exclusives before seeing the first game ported to the PlayStation 2, the NOLF series received critical praise at the time but only ever achieved moderate financial success, having been overshadowed by so many other major releases in the surrounding years, and was soon abandoned by Monolith in favor of new series like FEAR and Condemned a few years later. A series of publisher acquisitions and mergers subsequently allowed the copyright to fall into no man's land, with none of the companies who MIGHT own it actually knowing for sure if they do or not, and none of them having any apparent interest in finding out, despite developer Nightdive Studios' best efforts in recent years while attempting to file for the license in order to do a remake. The games have therefore never been re-released beyond their initial run, nor made available for digital download on modern distribution platforms like Steam or GOG, while any attempt at a remake or legacy sequel has been shut down due to all the legal uncertainty, thus cementing the series legacy in the annals of video game history as lost, forgotten gems.
Watch this full review in video form.
So why am I talking about a game series that you literally cannot buy
these days? Well, because they're really fun and unique games who main selling
points have stood the test of time and thus deserve to be remembered. And
even though you can't BUY any of these games, you can still PLAY them,
thanks to community revival projects that have worked to make them
playable on modern hardware and operating systems. You can even find free downloads that include the full game and all of the necessary patches in one easy installer if you know where to look, so it's easier than ever to play these games nowadays. That's technically a bit of a legal gray area, but with the games being effectively abandonware and none of the rights holders making any effort to protect their copyright or make them available to purchase over the last 20 years, it's pretty easy to justify in this instance. Of course, I own all of the games in their original physical formats so I was comfortable downloading these versions for this recent replay, and can confirm that they do work on my Windows 10 system. So if you were to download the updated versions, I would also encourage you to buy physical copies so you have your own legal license to play these games.
I played the NOLF games for the first time in late 2006 and considered
them, at the time, to be some of the most fun first-person shooters I'd ever
played, and some of my favorite games just in general. Having played them again in 2016 and just now in 2024, I can
definitely tell how much they've aged in the last 18 years since my first playthrough, never mind the 24 years since their original release. Some of the gameplay elements feel pretty dated,
granted, and each game does have some notable flaws both relative to
each other as well as other games of that era, so it's worth remembering
that these were not perfect games in their time and they certainly aren't now --
but the things that made them so novel back in the day, like the story, the
characters, the atmosphere, the setpieces, and the humor, are just as good now as
they were then. They were also somewhat groundbreaking games for their time,
being some of the first first-person shooters to not only allow but
encourage
stealth, while their emphasis on using spy gadgetry to complete your
objectives in a comical story-driven, groovy 60s setting makes these games
truly stand out from the crowd regardless of their age.
Perhaps the biggest testament to NOLF's core appeal is how much comparison can be drawn between it and other notable games of that era, like Half-Life, Thief, GoldenEye, System Shock, and Deus Ex, with NOLF taking inspirational elements from all of these iconic, classic games. Most of the individual components that NOLF borrows from these various games are not as strong as they are in their original source material -- the stealth is not on par with Thief, for instance, and the RPG mechanics are less robust than in System Shock or Deus Ex, but NOLF blends them all together with strong writing and narrative presentation, a wonderfully jovial tone,
and some of the most memorable level sequences of its time to create a unique combination that's ultimately better than the sum of its parts. It's even more
impressive when you consider that there really are a lot of interesting parts
to these games, with the wide variety of guns, the different types of
ammunition, all of Cate's cool spy gadgets, the vehicles, the variety of
mission types, and all the different locations. The story offers a
solid premise with a lot of good twists and hooks, and the silly,
lighthearted atmosphere offers the series a
uniquely refreshing vibe that will have you laughing at some of its
more ridiculous moments, or else simply smiling at the realization that
these games just want you to have fun, plain and simple.
The Operative: No One Lives Forever
The Operative: No One Lives Forever (hereafter referred to as NOLF1) introduces us to series protagonist Cate Archer as a rookie
agent in UNITY, a fictional British anti-terrorism agency akin to MI6.
Orphaned as a child, she turned to a life of crime and became a skilled
cat burglar known as "the fox," before being recruited to UNITY by
seasoned field agent Bruno Lawrie, who quickly became a mentor and close
friend to Cate. As the agency's first female agent in a world dominated
by 1960s sexism, Cate is relegated to the bottom of the totem pole
performing only simple, mundane assignments, and longs for a chance to
find excitement on a real field mission. When all of UNITY's top agents
are killed in the span of a few days, as the result of a suspected
traitor within the agency, Cate finds herself reluctantly called to
action by her superiors, who make it abundantly clear that they're only
relying on her now because of how short-handed they are.
With a chip on her shoulder, Cate sets out on her first mission to
Morocco, under the supervision of Bruno, to uncover intelligence on
known assassin Dmitrij Volkov and his connection to the upstart
terrorist organization HARM, suspected to be behind the UNITY field
agent assassinations. The mission turns out to be a trap setup by
Volkov, and Cate is barely able to escape after Volkov kills Bruno in an
ambush. Back at headquarters, her superiors, Mr Jones and Mr Smith,
theorize that Bruno was the traitor, and that Volkov killed him to tie
up loose ends. Cate vehemently disagrees with that theory, and vows to
prove Bruno's innocence and avenge his death. The rest of the game sees
Cate meeting up with informants in Germany, rescuing a German scientist,
escaping from a crashing plane, exploring a sunken freighter, breaking
into a high tech laser-protected safe, and riding a rocket up to a space
station, among other tasks in other exotic locales, while she tries to
figure out what HARM is up to and put a stop to their plans.
The story has a strong cinematic feel to it, and I don't just
mean because of the vast number of lengthy cutscenes. That's certainly
part of the reason, but the overall pacing and progression of the plot feels very much like something that could've been taken straight from an actual screenplay for a movie, just expanded into a full length video game campaign. It helps that it has you playing out and
witnessing all of the calmer moments in the story that help to logically move the plot from one scene to another, like attending mission briefings and debriefings, visiting Santa to
get your new gadgets, meeting up with informants, interrogating
henchmen, collecting intelligence, going under cover, sneaking into
facilities, interviewing suspects, and so on. We're with Cate at every step of the story, doing all the actual spywork necessary to help establish every major twist and development in the plot. In that sense, it's a
better James Bond game than many (or most?) actual James Bond games, since they all tend to focus more on the action side of things -- shooting dudes, getting in
car chases, and causing a lot of explosions. NOLF1 does all that
stuff too, mind you, but it mixes the pacing up sufficiently so that
there's always something new and different to do, and it tries to make
you feel more like an actual spy as opposed to generic Action Man
Protagonist from any other action shooter.
The Bond comparisons are hard to avoid, of course, seeing as NOLF seems so heavily inspired by the James Bond film franchise. I could go on forever listing out all the similarities from the styling of the title and subtitle to the opening credit sequence and all the similar plot beats in the game's structure or pointing out every little locale, scene, and image that has some direct parallel in an actual Bond movie, but that's really only interesting you're a Bond fan and can appreciate all those little details. There are also references to other 60's era spy shows like The Saint, The Avengers, Get Smart, Mission: Impossible, The Man from UNCLE, and so on, but I'm personally not as experienced with any of these as I am with James Bond so that's more of where my interest lies and what makes NOLF so entertaining for me.
There's also a bit of an Austin Powers influence, given NOLF's emphasis on comedy, but whereas Austin Powers is more of a farcical parody of spy movie tropes throughout, with Austin himself being one big joke [are you in the show], NOLF is more of a tongue-in-cheek homage that acknowledges the genre tropes while putting a more realistic, grounded twist on them. [interrogation. not killing people] Although it does have its share of goofiness with Magnus Armstrong and Inge Wagner, they each have their own personality and role in the story, with
their own motivations and subplots. Apart from the exaggerated
stereotyping and the ground quaking whenever Wagner walks, they're
relatively realistic characters whose humor stems from clever
writing with punchlines and contextual subversions [fatty. no singing for two weeks]. And although some moments in the plot do push towards the absurd [stuffy british guys], the game plays all of the main characters and the central threat of HARM
straight [briefing scene?]; this allows all of the side characters and
cut away moments to stand out for their lighthearted, almost whimsical
juxtaposition against the serious backdrop [pickup lines in Hamburg].
A lot of the humor can be found in written notes with entire story arcs conveyed across different types of intelligence that you can scavenge from within a level, like when HARM is being sued by the Hair Alternative Restoration for Men over their use of the HARM acronym, or witty dialogue that you can overhear as you sneak around different locations, with guards and henchmen discussing the more mundane aspects of working for a criminal organization like it's any ordinary job. Other bits of humor deal with amusing situations that subvert genre expectations, and occasionally visual gags as well. Even the guards' reactions to gunfire is funny, as is your mission briefing in a loading screen about the American ambassador to Morrocco whom you have to protect from assassins being extremely nearsighted and almost deaf, which feels almost like a meta commentary for NPC AI during escort quests, especially of this era when they often felt hopelessly inept. It really is a funny game, perhaps one of the funniest games of all time -- a lot of the game's entertainment value stems purely from laughing at its jokes or smiling in appreciation of the fun, whimsical tone it creates. Some of the voice acting is a little cheesy, of course, but that's part of the game's charm with its campy style that doesn't take itself TOO seriously.
The writing for the characters is where the storytelling really shines. Cate is an instantly likable
protagonist, demonstrating the capable confidence of typical badass
heroines without compromising her femininity, and while actually feeling
like a real person. She's smart, skilled, and her subtly contemptuous,
sarcastic responses to her bosses' chauvinistic remarks give her a
daring spirit you just want to root for as she tries to blaze a trail
for women in an era of blatant sexism. Many of the cutscenes also do a
good job of showing us the characters' histories and personality traits
just by how they interact with one another in the present time, without
feeling the need to resort to lengthy monologues like Cate does for some
of the other characters. The conversation between Cate and Bruno at
the start of the game, for instance, not only informs us of the
necessary backstory to
understand what's going on in the present, but it also shows Cate's
feisty stubbornness and Bruno's protectiveness of her. In just a few
minutes, we have a firm grasp of each character and their relationship
with one another, which makes it easy to care about them going into the
first mission of the game. Then, when she meets her new parter, Tom
Goodman -- the American agent working for UNITY -- there's some more
good dialogue that quickly establishes his personality as well as their
contrasting worldviews and methodologies, which will serve as the basis
for them butting heads as to how they go about completing some of their
objectives together, but also with some friendly banter that plants the
seed for a real sense of comradery to grow as they get more accustomed
to working together.
As I said before, there are a ton of cutscenes in this game, full of dialogue, action, and
plot development, but the game's pacing can suffer at times when you're
forced to sit there for long stretches of time barely doing anything.
It takes almost 30 minutes at the start of the game watching the opening
teaser, opening credits, introductory dialogue between Cate and Bruno,
attending your first mission briefing, then going through basic and
advanced training before you even get into the first mission. This
pattern repeats itself between every mission, often giving you 10-15
minutes of cutscenes and tutorials before you can get back to the actual
gameplay. The scenes back at UNITY headquarters can really drag on sometimes with their extensive exposition for every character that gets introduced to the plot via long monologues as Cate recites her encyclopedic knowledge of these people from memory, and with some of the mission briefings going into elaborate detail over every clue and every step of what's going on -- especially when you consider that there are hardly any animations during these prolonged conversations, where you basically just watch people standing around with the only motion being their jaws flapping and their eyelids blinking. The vocal performances of all the main cast, especially that of Cate,
played by Kit Harris, are all really good and help to lend some sense of liveliness to these visually drab cutscenes, but they're still a bit much to sit through in some cases. This is a prime example where the script could've been trimmed at least a little bit to tighten up the pacing of these scenes, or else they could've stood to have some more attention given to them with more interesting character animations and more engaging camera cuts.
On the other hand, this whole
rhythm of attending mission briefings and being trained with your new
gadgets does a good job of putting you in the mindset of being a secret
agent, which is certainly good for the atmosphere and immersion. In fact, the game has an almost immersive-sim-like quality to it, with the gameplay offering a fair amount of player choice with regards to what equipment you'll use, how you'll explore some of the game's more open levels, how you'll get to your objectives, and how you'll role-play Cate in dialogue -- which can, in some instances, influence mission difficulty, end of mission ratings, and just in general lead to extra branching dialogue trees. There's times when dialogue is even treated almost like a boss battle with a specific objective you're trying to accomplish. Many levels give you the choice to go in guns blazing shooting everything in sight, or sneak around avoiding confrontation altogether and going for non-lethal takedowns when necessary, with the choice to pick weapons and gadgets that you think will most suit your chosen playstyle for this particular level. It's here where the game's immersive-sim-like qualities kick in, with it basically just giving you a diverse set of tools in somewhat open-ended scenarios, and letting you devise your own creative solutions to things. It's nowhere near as open as other immersive-sims of that era like System Shock, Deus Ex, or Thief, since the gameplay is ultimately a little more scripted and linear, with much more focus on stealth and action versus other skills, but it gives enough of a taste to appeal to that same crowd if you like any of those other games.
NOLF1 uses a Thief-like stealth system that allows you to
sneak past guards and security cameras by avoiding their line of sight
and by minding how much noise you make moving on different types of
surfaces. Stealth is required in a few levels -- as in, you'll fail and have to restart from your last save if you get spotted or trigger an alarm -- but for the most part
it's just an option. It's really in your best interest to try to play stealthily, however,
because there are a ton of great conversations between henchmen that you
can only eavesdrop on if you approach them without alerting them [guy murdering his mother in law]. Not
all of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, such as when a couple
guards discuss meeting up for an improvisational jam session at a bar
after work, and some of them can run a little long and outstay their
welcome, but there's plenty of others that are extremely engaging to sit
through, like when you overhear a henchman go on a long philosophical
tirade about the sociology that leads one to a life of crime. This type
of dialogue is just so utterly unique to NOLF that you're really missing out on the full game experience if you're not taking the time to listen to these conversations in full and not putting yourself in a position to let them happen in the first place.
Unfortunately, the stealth system in NOLF1 is not that great. Despite taking some of its cues from the highly successful Thief games, NOLF1
doesn't give you enough immersive feedback to monitor how visible you
are to guards, who don't have as forgiving of a middle ground state
between spotting you and going into full alert. And unlike Thief, hiding in shadows doesn't seem to offer you any reduced visibility, as it seems to be based purely on range and line of sight. There's no ability to lean around corner, either -- you have to move
completely out from behind cover where I assume you're given a moment of
grace before a guard will react, allowing you to move back into cover
if you're quick enough, but that doesn't always seem to be the case. Often times you'll be
sneaking your way through a level feeling like you're being pretty quiet and well out of view, and a guard will catch a mere glimpse
of your elbow and immediately draw his weapon to fire on you, or else
immediately start running for the alarm. You do get a few tools like coins that you can use to lure guards' attention into out of the way areas, assorted perfume sprays that you can use to knock-out guards, body dissolver to instantly make dead bodies disappear before someone else wanders in and spots them, and camera disablers to... disable cameras, but these are of questionable viability when it often seems so random whether a guard will see or hear you before you have a chance to employ any of these tools. Some of these gadgets don't even unlock until maybe halfway through the campaign, so you have to go long stretches of the game without any of their possible benefits. Even just trying to give someone a good old fashioned judo chop to knock
them out seemed incredibly unreliable, to the point that I eventually
gave up on it entirely. Some of the levels likewise are just entirely on hard floor surfaces where you have no choice but to make a lot of noise while moving, making it extremely difficult to sneak up on or past anyone. And there's no option to toggle crouch, so to be more silent you have to either hold crouch the entire time, which is annoying, or toggle walk and remain upright the entire time, which would seem make you more visible than if you were crouching.
And once your cover's blown,
it's blown for good -- every guard in the area comes pouring into your
location, and you have to listen to that obnoxious siren for the entire
rest of the level. In the levels where stealth is absolutely mandatory,
success becomes entirely a
matter of trial-and-error as you figure out a precise series of linear
events, one step at a time, so that you can time everything just right.
Can I go to the right, here? Oh no there's two cameras right there. Can I maybe time this a little differently and get through? I guess not. What happens if I go left? Is this woman at the desk going to see me? I guess not. Alright now which doors in this hallway can I sneak into? Oh I guess the camera in the other room saw me. Okay so now if I just run straight through here I can get into the bathroom and into this construction area. Now let me try to take out this guard and oh no he somehow heard me. Alright let me try it again and oh no he turned a little sooner this time. Maybe if I wait a little bit I can catch him earlier and oh I guess the judo chop didn't work on the first hit and now an alarm's going off? Maybe I'll just ignore him then and move on to the next area. Now, is there anywhere else in this hallway I can maybe get in--aaand a camera saw me? Okay, so if I wait for that guy to move out of the way, and then I wait for the camera to turn away I can maybe sneak in behind him. Alright now what happens if I try to get into this room? Oh the camera saw me like instantly. Ok so maybe if I light this trashbin on fire I can cause a distraction to clear that security guard. Sweet, now let me get into the security office and oh my god I got snagged on the door for just a split second and the camera saw me what the fufsdfc. Now let me try this again, but time the fire better so the camera will be looking the other way at the right moment and oh I guess that wasn't right, and now the guard is coming back. And uhh oh he saw me. Alright, third time's the charm. Aaaand finally I'm in the damn security office and can shut off those darn cameras.
Missions like these are supposed to make you feel like a undercover agent going Super Spy Mode, ghosting your way into restricted areas to grab the intelligence you need and get out with no one ever being any the wiser that you were ever there, but all the clunky stealth elements and the inconsistencies with timing and the necessity for trial-and-error largely defeat the intended feeling you're supposed to get from succeeding in that mission -- you don't FEEL like a Super Spy, you just feel like you're stuck in an awkwardly scripted video game environment brute forcing your way through its solutions by manipulating save states. It's a
shame, because the stealth is really fun when it works the way it was intended in some of the other levels, and you're able
to sneak your way through while silently taking out guards, dodging
cameras, swiping the intelligence, and making your getaway while that cool, swanky stealth music
plays, because you really do feel like a secret agent in those moments. These moments,
sadly, are rare, as you'll either spend all of your time frustratingly
spamming quick-save and quick-load, or else give up on stealth
altogether and run around the level shooting everything in sight once someone catches sight of you and raises the alarm.
Combat is fairly standard for a game of NOLF1's age, having been
released in 2000, before any more modern gameplay functions started
making their way into shooters. There's no regenerating health; any
damage you sustain beyond your body armor can never be healed during the
mission, and damaged body armor requires you to find spare vests lying
around the level. There's no aiming down your sights to line up a shot
-- you just run, aim, and shoot with the targeting reticle in the middle
of the screen. There's no sprinting -- you either run at normal speed,
or you walk to avoid alerting guards. There's no leaning around corners
-- you have to step out from behind cover, briefly, to fire shots at
enemies. There's no fully rendered character model for you
see as you look down at your feet -- you're just a floating camera with a
gun and two arms attached to it -- unless you happen to look in a mirror which does a full third-person render of the scene. Some of these things aren't necessarily problems and others might even be considered a benefit, but it definitely makes the FPS gameplay seem a little
primitive, but everything is totally functional, and the animations and
sound effects for the various guns make firing them as satisfying as you
could ask for a game of this era.
Enemy AI is not the smartest in the world, seeing as the easiest way to get through a level is often just to brazenly fire your gun in the air to alert enemies of your presence and location and wait for them to stream in where they can get mowed down as they come through a doorway or around the corner. But a lot of other times they'll take cover and put suppressing fire on you, forcing YOU to move out of safety if you want to pick them off. There's even some fun scripted moments where they'll flip tables for cover or use other aspects of the environments to their advantage. Overall, the AI doesn't seem to be anything all that special, but it seems pretty standard from what I remember of other shooters in this era, and certainly sufficient for the gameplay style that NOLF is going for. If this were supposed to be a more tactical shooter focused exclusively on the combat, then it obviously might not be, but since most of the gameplay is sneaking around and picking off guards maybe two or three at a time, it's fine.
Where combat gets interesting is all the variety of weapons and gadgets at your disposal. You've got several different types of pistols and submachine guns and an AK-47, each with multiple types of ammunition that do extra types of effects like bleeding, burning, or corrosion; two sniper rifles; a speargun and a crossbow; a grenade launcher and an explosive pistol; and eventually two types of laser guns. Some of these can be equipped with extra attachments like silencers and scopes. So there's plenty of options to find guns you like that might serve a better purpose in different situations. Then you've got all the spy gadgets, which are disguised as various feminine
fashion products. There's several tubes of lipstick that double as
different types of explosive grenades, and different types of perfume
that can be sprayed at enemies to put them to sleep or to kill them in a
cloudburst of corrosive acid. Your hair barrette doubles as a lockpick, and triples as a poison dagger, while your belt
buckle doubles as a zip-cord grappling hook. You can even get a briefcase that turns into a rocket launcher. Other gadgets you can use, which
serve less of a combat function but relate to manipulating the
environment include a cigarette lighter, which turns into a welder for cutting open
locks and door hinges, and sunglasses that have extra functionality as a spy camera, infrared visor, and mine detector. Besides that, you get a few extra more conventional spy tools like the camera disabler and code breaker, plus the more unconventional robot poodle for distracting guard dogs.
Most of these gadgets are fairly standard tools that have been featured in a lot of other games, in different ways, but it's NOLF's
unique implementation that makes them so fun to use. Throwing
a grenade around a corner to kill a group of enemies is a fairly
mundane task in most other shooters, but it's made special in this game
by the mere fact that you're throwing your lipstick at them. Likewise, sneaking up
to a couple of guards who're busy talking to one another and spraying
them with a cloud of acid from a perfume bottle can be immensely satisfying.
The other tools, like the lockpick, decoder, and welder are fun, too,
because they're items that you manually toggle when you need to use
them. When you come to a locked door and need to cut it off its hinges, a
button prompt doesn't pop up telling you "Press A to weld" as you watch
a three second cutscene -- you have to make the mental connection on your
own that you can even weld this door, and then you equip your welder,
aim it, and take the hinges off yourself. It's a simple thing, really,
but it does a tremendous job of connecting you with the environment
you're in and making you feel like you're the one putting the pieces together to solve the puzzle. Like I said with regards to the game's immersive-sim-like nature, all these different tools combine to allow you a fair amount of freedom for how you go about completing your objectives, eliminating or getting past guards, and navigating the levels.
The level design usually contributes to this freedom, with most of them being somewhat open in allowing you to approach objectives from different angles or explore different branching side areas, but they're still pretty linear in their overall structure as you move across the map in sequence doing things in a particular order. When you get onto the space station for instance you can take elevators to different decks where you have to complete different tasks, making it SEEM like it's going to be a hub system similar to the Von Braun in System Shock 2, but you don't get to choose where the elevators go since they always just take you directly the next floor you need to be on. Often times, what seems like an interesting side path will terminate in an awkward dead end that forces you to backtrack, or else it just loops right back to the main path anyway. And the level design doesn't always do a good job of telegraphing where important objectives are or what pathways are part of the main path versus an optional side path or which doorways will trigger a scene transition that completes that stage of the level. So there's a fair amount of backtracking involved if you want to explore everywhere possible to locate all the hidden intelligence and maximize your equipment, or if you get to the end of the level and discover you missed an objective somewhere, or unwittingly advance to the next scene before thoroughly exploring the area (in which case you have to reload a save), or if you just want to fetch some body armor you passed a while ago that you didn't need at the time. So that aspect of the level design can be particularly annoying.
The levels excel, however, at putting you
in a huge variety of locations with a lot of truly memorable areas and
sequences. Defending the American ambassador in the Moroccan hotel with a series of shooting galleries; meeting up with informants in the streets of Germany; blending in with civilians at the night club and luring a goon into the bathroom to beat him up; sneaking through the train cars without being caught by the conductor and then fighting your way out of it; falling out
of an airplane and stealing a parachute from a guy in mid fall; scuba diving into the wrecked
freighter and fighting off sharks and other divers with a spear gun; going undercover to interview the Baron Dumas and then breaking into his secured vault by dodging laser beams; riding a motorcycle through the jungle and escaping from a blast pit launch test to hitch a ride on a rocket up to a space station; finding an escape pod to escape from the space station as it's being destroyed by meteors; riding a
snowmobile through the Alps and then escaping from the castle by riding a gondola down the mountain while fighting off helicopters; frantically rushing through the streets to rescue civilians before an explosion goes off; the list goes on with just so many unique scenarios, that it always feels like you're doing something new and exciting in every single mission. Even when some of the missions start to repeat similar types of gameplay segments, like infiltrating the Moroccan fortress, or infiltrating the German base, or infiltrating the Dumas shipping docks, or infiltrating the Dumas lumberyard, the environments themselves are so different in their atmosphere and general aesthetic, not to mention completely different structural designs, that it never gets to feel repetitive.
The game's ending demonstrates just how much exciting stuff Monolith packed
into this game. After you've finally figured out who the mastermind
behind HARM's schemes is and what they're ultimately planning, you set out on what would seem to be your final set of missions, which throws constant twists and extra
objectives at you, keeping the action and story moving forward through
what feels like five or six different endings. Without spoiling
anything, this is how the ending sequences play out: you fight a boss,
then you stop the big bad guy, then you find out you've been poisoned
and have to rush to find the antidote, then you fight a series of
mini-bosses, then you have to escape from the building before it
explodes, then you fight another boss, then you fight the real final
boss, then you have to rush to rescue civilians, then you're confronted
by the UNITY traitor, then you meet another unexpected traitor, then there's one last twist reveal, and then
you finally get to watch the final resolution. Then once the credits
finish rolling, you get a teaser for a possible sequel that also recontextualizes somethings that happened earlier in the game, and then if you're playing the Game of the Year Edition there's a whole bonus mission tacked on.
There are so many levels and cutscenes in this game that the campaign
will last you 15-20 hours, which is a tremendous value for a shooter,
considering that most modern shooters are only half as long, if that. And while it's a fairly long game, it never feels like it because
it's always mixing the formula up by introducing you to new things,
whether that be new gameplay mechanics in the form of your new spy
gadgets that progressively unlock over the course of the game, or
whether it's the sheer variety of locations you visit and types of
missions you're assigned. There's even some decent replay value, if you're so inclined, since you're able to go back and replay missions while selecting a different loadout or going for a higher score, which will unlock extra performance-based bonuses to your stats. Some of the levels also have locked side paths or extra bits of intelligence that you can't access on your first pass through that level, and so you have to come back later and replay the mission with extra gadgets you've unlocked later in the campaign, which can be fun to finally go back and see what that thing was that you couldn't do the first time around.
If there's one major issue that NOLF has, it's that they maybe tried to cram a little TOO much in the game, without really fleshing everything out as well as they could have. The vehicles, for instance, feel like they were tacked on solely to give the player more Things to Do™ in the gameplay, but they control really clumsily and they don't integrate with the rest of the gameplay since you always have to awkwardly come to a stop and get off the vehicle in order to shoot at the bad guys, and then get back on the vehicle to continue forward in the level, which is mostly just a brunch of drawn-out corridors where driving the vehicle is effectively the same as walking there, except it's faster and harder to control. It's not like you ever have to race against the clock dodging enemy fire and navigating around complicated obstructions to reach your destination in some way that would justify the use of a vehicle, though with how tricky they are to control that honestly might've made the gameplay even worse.
Likewise, a fair amount of weapons and gadgets were thrown in purely for the sake of variety without a lot of actual, meaningful utility. Like, there are three different versions of a 9mm submachine gun, that all seem basically the same, and I'm not sure how often the different types of ammunition actually serve a specific benefit. The robo-dog is a fun concept, but it's literally useless as I don't believe there's ever a situation where you need to worry about guard dogs possibly raising the alarm since they only occur in limited instances where alarms either don't matter, or where you can dispatch other guards around them in safety. Then you've got the dialogue and reputation system, which they seemed to put a decent amount of focus on for the first mission, but the end of mission reputation bonuses do literally nothing because they presumably just stopped developing that system after already implementing it, and then the dialogue choices disappear for most of the game except in a handful of instances where they don't have a major effect on anything. The one "dialogue boss fight" where you have to provoke Magnus will actually fail the mission if you don't pick enough of the right options, but if you press the space bar to skip the cutscene it skips all the dialogue prompts and cuts right to the boss battle as if you succeeded, anyway, so like what's the point? Then there's all the lengthy dialogue and cutscenes that, while very well written and acted, could've used a hefty dose of trimming to tighten up the game's overall pacing, especially when paired with the sometimes overbearing training sequences.
They were obviously quite ambitious with all the content they wanted to put in the game, which is admirable, but some things feel obviously incomplete to the point that they really needed to have more time to develop them further, or else could've benefited from cutting some of the fat to put more of their focus on beefing up some of the game's more important aspects (like the stealth, or the dialogue, or the enemy AI).
It's worth mentioning that this review has been based on the PC version, but there's also a PS2 port which has a few notable differences. The biggest one is the inclusion of three exclusive levels were you play flashbacks of Cate's previous life as a cat burglar. These bonus levels are relatively short as they each only last one scene, but they give you more traditional Thief-like objectives where you're trying to steal people's briefcases around town, or sneak into a bar and clear out their safes, or infiltrate a haunted mansion to steal a guarded diamond. They're set up to be relatively simple with only a few patrolling guards and no obnoxious security cameras, so they don't suffer so much from the tedious trial-and-error of the base game and can be pretty fun in their own right. Especially that haunted castle level with some of its weird ghostly assistance you need to get from the resident spirit. I also just like that classic image of stealing the diamond from the display case, replacing it with a fake one, and putting everything back together again. They do disrupt the flow of the main missions a little bit, however, to be suddenly playing out a random flashback for seemingly no reason, but they're put in the game as tastefully as you could by occurring in moments after Cate gets knocked out. Still, I think it might've been better to make them part of a separate mini-campaign that you could access from the main menu after completing the game or something.
The other big change is that the PS2 version uses a completely different soundtrack. I'm not entirely sure why, like if it was a rights issue or if the PS2 just had trouble processing the adaptive nature of the original score, which could seamlessly change with faster tempos or louder dynamics as the circumstances around you changed. Either way, they hired a brand new composer to make an all-new soundtrack, and I actually kind of like it.
The music in the original game was composed largely by Guy Whitmore, with the imperative of capturing the stylistic tone of 60's spy movies without getting too close to infringing on existing copyright. He definitely accomplished that with its heavily reverberating twangy guitar riffs and horn licks, but there's definitely a bit of a restrained feel where I can tell he's really not going for that full John Barry sound. The music by Rebecca Kneubuhl for the PS2 version, on the other hand, takes a slightly different approach and puts a heavier emphasis on the bass and brass which I, as a brass musician and electric bass player, really appreciate. Her track for "Nine Years Later" has some really solid bass grooving going on and an epic brass crescendo that hits so hard and gets me so pumped up, that it's my favorite piece of either soundtrack. Other tracks have some pretty fun trombone slide work going on, which I really like as well. Besides that, I feel like some of her tracks do a better job of setting the atmosphere for specific locations -- like how her track for Morocco uses hand drums and a flute melody, which I feel suits the environments better than Whitmore's surf rock electric guitar and sporadic brass hits. Now, I still really like Whitmore's soundtrack -- it's got some really good pieces that fit the game's tone really well, and I think it works better for the sake of interactive background music in a video game, but I find Kneubuhl's soundtrack more fun for active listening outside of the game, as is evident with her bonus soundtrack "In the Lounge," which came with the original PC version on a separate CD as game-inspired supplemental music.
Unfortunately, the PS2 version is straight up inferior than the PC version, otherwise, due to it running at a lower resolution, narrower aspect ratio, lower framerate, lower quality graphics and audio, with clunky, imprecise PS2 controller aiming that almost necessitates the need for auto-aim, more frequent loading screens breaking up the missions and disrupting your ability to backtrack or take alternate routes to an objective, and no ability to save your progress during a mission. That alone makes the game almost unbearable when you're trying to get through those tedious trial-and-error stealth levels and have to re-do the whole scene any time you get caught, and frustrating when you mistime a jump and have to start all over. And because you can't select your equipment before a mission, there's a ton of missing intelligence and optional side branches that have been cut out of the game completely. Other spots in levels have likewise been trimmed down or cut out, presumably to save space on the disc or in the game's memory banks. So I can't really recommend the PS2 version unless you've already played the PC version and just want to experience a few extra levels and an all-new soundtrack. Otherwise, if you're only ever going to play one version, then the PC version should be the way to go.
NOLF2: A Spy inHARM's Way
No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in HARM's Way (hereafter referred to as NOLF2) takes place some time after the first game, with Cate now a
full-fledged and respected agent of UNITY. Now that the agency is aware of HARM's true Director, Cate is sent to Japan to spy on a criminal crime convention and photograph the participants. After meeting
with an informant and getting pictures of HARM's director, Cate
is ambushed by the Director's right hand, Isako -- the leader of an
all-female clan of ninjas. Cate is left for dead after sustaining a stab
wound through her chest, near her shoulder, but is recovered by UNITY
agents and nursed back to health in a few weeks. In the meantime, UNITY
has been informed by American military intelligence agents that tensions
are rising between them and the Soviet Union over the island of Khios regarding something called "Project: Omega," which HARM may have some involvement with. The rest of the game sees Cate traveling to Siberia, Ohio, Kolkata, Antarctica, and eventually Khios, in her efforts to stop HARM from causing World War 3 with
their new super soldiers.
In creating the sequel,
Monolith took into consideration all the praise and criticism of NOLF1 and tweaked things for NOLF2,
some for the better, and unfortunately, some for the worse. The
gameplay is much improved, but that sadly comes at the expense of the
plot and atmosphere, which were arguably the main selling points of the original. NOLF1's
story was much more personal and engaging, with Cate struggling to
prove herself in a world dominated by men and trying to avenge the death
of her mentor and close friend, Bruno, while dealing with the internal
threat of a mole within the agency going around assassinating other
field agents. It had exciting twists as main characters died and as the
mystery built towards dramatic reveals. NOLF2's story, in
contrast, is much less interesting because the stakes are less personal, and because everything is already
established from the beginning -- Cate's already a respected field agent
at the start, and we already know who HARM is, who their Director is,
and what their general plans are. There's a lot less exciting intrigue as the plot itself is much more straightforward -- basically being just "stop the bad guys" the whole way through -- and the mission structure tends to get bogged down with gameplay objectives that don't necessarily advance the plot forward, as a lot of it feels like busy work to pad the game's already shorter running time. The story is adequately entertaining for a stealth-FPS of this nature, but it's really more of a framework for the gameplay as opposed to a main selling point like it was in NOLF1.
Cate herself feels diminished a bit in the sequel, as well. Kit Harris did not reprise her voice role in the sequel, with Jen Taylor instead providing the voice of Cate. Taylor does a fine enough job with what she's given, but I just like Harris in the role more, as I find her voice to be more formal, fuller, and more mature, which I feel is a better fit for the strong, independent woman and capable spy that Cate is supposed to be. Besides that she also feels underwritten in the sequel. She gets a lot less screen time in general, and the lines she does get don't have as much clever wit or colorful flavor to them. When she would defend herself or insult someone in NOLF1 it was often with some element of sarcasm or fun word play -- now in NOLF2 her rebuttals seem to be much more blunt, which like Armstrong says, makes her seem like a bit of a bully and therefore a little less charming than she was originally.
Part of the reason we get so much less of Cate in the sequel is that the amount of cutscenes have been drastically reduced, with all of them being significantly shorter as well. That was definitely the right call, seeing as the cutscenes really dragged down the pacing of the first game, but they trimmed them SO much in the sequel that they often skip right over important establishing shots and scene transitions that are necessary to make them flow logically, as well as major plot details that should be there to setup what's going on in the story and why you're doing the things you're doing. See, for example, how the game transitions from the end of Chapter Six to the start of Chapter Seven -- Cate's fighting Isako in the middle of a tornado, then Isako escapes, and then it cuts right to Cate lying in a hospital bed, and then it cuts right to Cate near a bar searching for Armstrong. It moves so fast you get whiplash from being in three different locations in such a short amount of time with no explanation for how Cate managed to survive the tornado or what she's trying to accomplish by finding Armstrong. Later on she just randomly shows up on HARM's secret underwater base looking for Armstrong, after having never even mentioned this base's existence, even. I'm assuming she learned about it from Kamal in that one cutscene in India, but it cuts away before he actually mentions WHERE Armstrong is being held.
Generally speaking, some aspect of your next objective will always be mentioned at some point in a piece of intelligence you acquire in the previous levels, but because mission briefings and debriefings are now practically non-existent there's never any moment when the characters stop to actually process this information and assign any meaning to it. In the case of the underwater base, that was just something you read in passing in a random piece of intelligence two whole chapters ago, so it's hard to ascribe any major significance to it in the moment and then hard to remember it later on. Say what you will about those cutscenes in NOLF1, but they really helped to connect the dots of the story, and they served a purpose in tying everything together in a presentable way that you could easily follow. You can still follow the plot in NOLF2, but it requires you to fill in the blanks more so on your own, but even then everything feels extremely rushed, as if there are entire missions and cutscenes that were planned but never got produced. If the underwater base were part of NOLF1, there would've been an entire mission with multiple scenes about sneaking into some facility to learn where it is, and then getting on board by commandeering one of HARM's submersibles, but that's not the case with NOLF2. It's kind of telling that a lot of the main throughline is actually told via loading screens, as if that was their last-minute solution to filling in the details that they ran out of time to convey properly.
Although, that may have been a deliberate choice from the beginning to streamline the amount of downtime between missions, which admittedly could run overly long in NOLF1. Instead of listening to Mr Jones and Mr Smith drone on for five minutes about your next objectives and having to go through gadget training before every single mission, all of that information is now conveyed through text on the loading screen, spoken word over top of establishing cutscenes, radio transmissions and hidden notes from Unity HQ, and robotic spy birds sent ahead by Santa. This helps get you into gameplay much more quickly, and presents you with the important information in more varied and interactive ways. Although it was kind of nice to have a little practice facility to test out some of the gadgets beforehand, it just works better for the sake of the pacing for you to find presents from Santa within the level and have him or a little note explain it to you. It is a little immersion-breaking during the first mission in Japan, however, which is mostly there to serve as a gameplay tutorial, when Santa is breaking the fourth wall to explain abstract gameplay mechanics and the interface screens to you.
The fun 1960's setting carries over from NOLF1, however it's not portrayed quite as strongly. The first game had quite a few environments that really accentuated that 60's aesthetic, from Cate's apartment to assorted restaurants and bars and clubs and office buildings, all of which gave you the opportunity to appreciate the unique furniture, fashion, technology, and artwork of that era with a good splash of color. NOLF2, in contrast, has you spending the bulk of your time in drab Soviet-concrete military facilities in both Siberia and Antarctica, that really aren't that interesting to look at, or else has you running around more exotic environments in Japan and India that seem to be more historically and traditionally based, and thus don't really incorporate much of the contemporary groovy rainbow, psychedelic flower power imagery that we in the West commonly associate with that era. I like seeing these different areas, but the iconic 60's vibe is much more subdued this time around, with only a couple of environments that come close to matching the tone of the first game. The music in NOLF1 was likewise based on typical 1960's spy genre sounds to drive the period tone throughout the whole experience, whereas the sequel uses more timeless instruments and musical stylings to sell the LOCATION more than the TIME period, which changes to match each specific location. While I appreciate the effort to make the music in Japan, Siberia, India, and the Underwater Base feel more like you're actually in these locations, it's a bit of a shame to lose out on some of that fun 60's vibe as it really only kicks in during the action scenes. That music is really fun, and I think the game does strike a good balance between locational themes and period genre stuff -- it's just that, with the more subdued visual theming, I think the music could've done a little more to bring out the fun 60's factor that was so strong in the first game.
The humorous tone likewise makes a return, with the same emphasis on reading fun subplots through written intelligence you find during levels, and overhearing henchman having random conversations with each other. In that regard it's pretty comparable to the first game, although I'm not sure any of the notes or conversations are quite as fun or memorable as the ones from NOLF1. The rest of the game, however, leans even harder into the comedy, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your tastes. The Director is just a straight up Doctor Evil-like caricature with his ridiculous "artificial volcano" lair and underwater base, his overbearing mother always calling to chastise and interrupt him,
and his absurd gameshow-style torture device that mangles his own
henchmen into living cubes. Volkov has now become another joke of a character with his full body cast wheel chair that shoots missiles at you, and which then spins wildly out of control sending him flying comically over the edge of the railing into the artificial lava. Newly introduced is Pierre, a little French
unicycle-riding mime who gets no deeper characterization beyond that surface-level imagery and who serves no real point in the plot; he and his goons show up at a couple points seemingly just so that you can shoot at mimes who mime at inappropriate times, like when being shot at or when delivering situation reports, and so that you and Armstrong can hop onto a tricycle for an epic
machine-gun chase through the streets of India. This stuff is all funny,
certainly, and the game is SUPPOSED to be a light-hearted chucklefest
so I can't pretend like this is some kind of objective fault, but it's
just so ridiculously over-the-top that you can't take ANY of the game's
villains seriously, and so I ultimately prefer the more subtle, grounded
execution of NOLF1.
Probably the best thing about NOLF2's story is how much it
references the previous game. Besides major things like Dr Schenker sticking around with UNITY, Armstrong
coming back as an ally, and
visiting Tom Goodman's old house in Ohio, there are a lot of
smaller nods and references if you've been paying enough attention to both games. For example, in the Moroccan
hotel of NOLF1, you can find a letter from a man named Clark, in
which he writes to his wife that he was actually a secret agent using
her for cover, and that he was going to leave her; in NOLF2, you run into Clark and a find a letter on his corpse in which he regrets his decision to leave her and wants her back. In NOLF1 you can read all about HARM's lawsuit from the Hair Alternative Restoration for Men, and then see that lawsuit referenced again in NOLF2. Throughout NOLF1 you catch various references to some high-tech gizmo that UNITY is developing, known as the CT-180, as well as a few UNITY researchers talking about designs for other CT models, and then in NOLF2 you get to use the CT-180 as an actual gadget. It's mostly all minor stuff, but
they're almost like fun easter eggs that help lend the two games extra unexpected continuity.
Gameplay is fortunately much improved in NOLF2, and it's here where the sequel really earns its status. Much like the first game, NOLF2 is primarily a stealth-shooter, but it also has adventure game-style elements to it, like going to a
certain location to do non-combat things. At the start of mission two,
in Siberia, for instance, you have to break into a cabin, restart the
generator, radio headquarters, then you've got to unlock the shed, then get gasoline for the snowmobile from a
nearby soviet outpost, then you're crawling on the support beams under a
bridge setting explosive charges, all while only fighting about six or
nine guys in total, two or three at time. As such, NOLF2 is a shooter
that's as much about exploration and interacting with the environment
as it is about shooting dudes, if not more so. This is one area where
Monolith improved the gameplay, with a new emphasis on searching bodies
for loot and extra intelligence, and searching through filing cabinets
and stacks of paper for intelligence, in addition to levels like Ohio and Antarctica that are more about exploring and solving
simple environmental puzzles than they are about combat.
The biggest change to NOLF2's gameplay is the inclusion of an
experience points-based skill system, that has you earning skill points
for completing objectives and gathering intelligence. This is a nice change, because it gives you psychological and practical rewards for
doing things in the game, which you can then apply to make your character
better at various tasks, in a more directly applicable way than the end-of-mission bonuses you could get in NOLF1. It also adds to the overall strategy of the
game, because you have to choose how to invest your points between
the different skills, which can help shape your playstyle by granting unique strengths and weaknesses depending on what you choose to prioritize. If you want
to be a guns-blazing maniac, you can put your points exclusively into
marksmanship and weapons, which will improve your damage, accuracy,
recoil reduction, and reload speed with firearms, making it much easier to kill enemies. But then of course, you'll be attracting a lot of extra attention to yourself and may find yourself dying really easily if you're not quick enough with dispatching enemies, in which case you may want to put some points into stamina and armor so you can survive hits better. And if you're constantly blitzing through your ammo by going full auto, then you may want to put points into carrying so that you can load up on more ammunition. Or maybe you should put points into search so you can grab extra ammo, bandages, and armor pads more quickly from defeated enemies in the middle of combat. If you want to be a more traditional spy, then you might put points into gadgets, search, and stealth instead so you can break into secure locations, avoid patrolling guards, and grab hidden intelligence from filing cabinets without getting caught, which might not even be possible in some situations if you've been completely ignoring those skills.
If there's one issue with this skill point system, it's that you can soft-lock yourself into a horribly
sub-optimal skill configuration that makes a few of the game's mandatory action sequences and boss battles unbearably
difficult if you've spent ALL of your skill points on non-combat skills.
That's a bummer, because the first few levels make it seem like stealth
should always be an option, but by your third mission to Ohio you're
suddenly confronted by swarms of attack ninjas that you have to
frantically run away from and then fight in an enclosed arena complete
with a boss battle, where a lack of combat skills can leave you really struggling. It's not as big of an issue here, as it is in, say, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, because the NOLF
games are clearly geared towards being first-person shooters with a stealth system as opposed to stealth games with a combat system, but it is still a little disjointed to have this seemingly open skill-system and gameplay scenarios randomly bottleneck you into more specific playstyles.
Stealth works a lot better in NOLF2 than it did in NOLF1, however, in large part because it's just much more forgiving. When you're
spotted, guards usually go into a type of "investigate mode" before going into full alert, which gives you a
chance to hide again before they start attacking you, or else
take them out before they can alert their buddies. Even if they do go to full alert, they don't become omnisciently aware of your position within the level, which allows you to break their line of sight and ditch them at a crossroad to find a hiding spot, which gives you better feedback about when you're actually hidden from view, so you can stay out of sight long enough for them to eventually give up the search and return to their normal patrols. If an alarm is
sounded, it only goes for a a minute or two instead of staying active for the entire rest of the level, and missions where stealth is mandatory only end if you're actually apprehended, as opposed to the moment you're spotted, so there's more room for error which cuts back on the excessive need for trial-and-error quick-saving and loading. With the inclusion
of the CT-180 Utility Launcher, a type of pistol that shoots special
ammunition, you can disable cameras from a distance, which is more effective than having to sneak up underneath them, and also mark guards on your radar so you
can keep track of where they are to avoid being spotted so easily by accident. You can also lean around corners to see
where you're going better before stepping out of cover, you can turn off
lights and close doors to stay hidden better, and you can pick up and
move dead or unconscious bodies without being limited by body remover so it's easier to cover your tracks.
The stealth still has some minor annoyances, however. The hiding spots are pre-coded in specific locations, which can make it a little finicky finding one while under duress, if you turn into a remote corner somewhere that SEEMS like it would be a good hiding place, but which the developers did not code as a hiding place. Guards can also be randomly hyper-perceptive to minor details that I would think, logically, they shouldn't be. Like for example, you leave footprints behind you when walking in the snow, and guards can actually notice this. But there are lots of other people walking around these areas, so why is seeing footprints so suspicious that they immediately start searching for an intruder? I guess Cate must be wearing high heels, and thus her footprints are different from the soldiers' boots, and the guards are also perceptive enough to notice this difference? At other times, a guard can be lying in bed fast asleep, but then become immediately alerted once you turn the light off. I would understand if you turned the light on, how it might disturb their sleep enough for them to notice, but not so much when you're turning them OFF.
Patrolling guards are supposed to recognize when things look amiss, like if you leave a door open that had previously been closed, or if the lights in a room are randomly off when they weren't a few minutes ago, or maybe even if there are open filing cabinets somewhere -- this is a neat feature for making the stealth more believable, with a little extra demand on the player to make sure you leave a room in the same condition you found it -- but there are times when guards would seem to drastically overreact. Like, is it really THAT suspicious to see an open door with a missing guard in an office somewhere? Maybe the guy just had to go use the restroom or something. Many guards also aren't given specific routines, but instead have somewhat free-roam parameters for different places they can go and different things they can be doing. This is good for creating a lot of dynamic situations with more organic guard behavior, but it can also randomly create situations that seem virtually impossible to get through by stealth, which can reinstate a frustrating amount of trial-and-error to certain levels and certain situations.
That guard behavior works with the more forgiving stealth to create a lot of tense, exciting moments of improvisation, however. Instead of memorizing a rote sequence of events that you KNOW you'll be guaranteed to succeed at, every action has some degree of uncertainty to it where you might have to suddenly change your plans and make some kind of quick decision that you weren't intending. And since the situations can play out a little differently, and you don't get punished as hard for making a mistake, there's more incentive to live with whatever happens and play the hand you're dealt, versus constantly quick-saving and quick-loading all the time. You NEEDED to do that in certain levels of NOLF1, but you were also incentivized in THAT game to reload if you made big enough mistakes because once your cover was blown, it was blown for the rest of the level, and you could never replenish lost health during a mission -- only body armor. With NOLF2, you're able to "reset" and go back to stealth after being caught so it's not game-breaking to be caught, and you can also find bandages in the levels and in enemies' inventory so there's more of a chance to recover after taking a bunch of damage in a firefight.
Another wrinkle in this improvisational equation is that many levels feature infinitely respawning enemies by constantly trickling extra
guards into the level through transitions to other areas, to replace
guards that you kill. Guards that you knock-out with the taser or tranquilizer darts will likewise wake up eventually, where they may cower in fear if you took their weapon and moved them to a remote location, or else get up and try to alert everyone else. These features garnered a lot of harsh criticism at
the time, and indeed it annoyed the crap out of me at first once I
realized it was happening, because it felt like the game was
deliberately undoing my progress by making me repeat myself, constantly
taking out more guards, searching their corpses, and relocating them to
an obscure corner of the map, over and over and over again, or else having to incapacitate the same guard again after having already done so once.
And then I realized something: most of the
skills are meant to make you perform actions more quickly -- searching
bodies or stacks of paper for intelligence, picking locks or decoding
keypads, going into hiding, moving bodies, etc -- and so the game
requires you to be constantly under pressure in order for these skill
upgrades to be practical. Otherwise, you could just kill every guard in
the level and take all the time you want to decode terminals and search
for intelligence, which would render most of the skills utterly
pointless and remove a fair bit of challenge from the gameplay. Once I realized this, I changed my mindset and started investing points a little differently, which made things so much more interesting
with me trying not to kill guards, if I could avoid it, because I'd just
be dealing with their replacements later, anyway, and trying to move
from area to area quickly grabbing all of the intelligence without getting
caught. I found that it was usually possible to kill a few guards in each area before triggering the respawn, so it was usually best to leave some alive, which led to a lot more engaging gameplay with deciding which ones I wanted to risk taking out, and which ones I wanted to risk trying to leave alive, with putting tracker darts on some of the patrolling guards so I could keep key an eye on them better to plan my movements around them.
This sort of gameplay is even further aided in NOLF2 with more open level design, which gives you a lot more opportunity to see situations up ahead, like which guards are positioned where, what your angles of approach might be, and so on, so that you can initiate combat on your own terms or plan a course of action to sneak past them. In one situation, you might for example opt to go around the left, or go to the right and sneak up from behind, or cut right through the middle. There are almost always two or three routes through a given level, with specific features intended to allow for different playstyles and varying degrees of creativity, in terms of which path you'll take and what tools or equipment you'll use in the process. Some levels even give you a little more of a free-roaming environment where you have the choice of what order you'll complete your objectives in, or else have you bouncing back and forth between different ends of the map as new objectives pop up, thus ensuring that they don't feel quite so linear in just forcing you down a funneled path from the start of the level to the end.
They did take away your ability to choose your equipment loadout for each mission, which reduces some of the open-ended freedom, but this may have been because they greatly streamlined the weapon selection by getting rid of so many redundancies to the point that there's not much NEED to select alternate weapons for a given mission, or else because they wanted to make sure the levels were balanced properly around a particular loadout. So while I do lament the loss of equipment selection, I can kind of get behind it. It helps that they added some extra weapons and gadgets with new functionality that weren't in the original game, like with the CT-180 gadget gun that can shoot glue darts to pin enemies in place, or bear traps that you can plant in front of alarms or in major choke points to catch guards by surprise, in addition to other things like shurikens and tulwars, and turning the formerly useless robo-puppy into a robo-kitty that acts as a proximity mine. What bugs me, however, is when they randomly take options away from you during a mission, like when I returned to the streets of India needing to once again evade police offers and found that my glue darts were inexplicably taken away from me, or when Cate sets out for an espionage mission without certain tools that would seem pertinent for a spy, like how she doesn't bring a basic set of lockpicks to a remote research station in Antarctica which will presumably have secured locations she'll need to break into. These are relatively minor quibbles
Where NOLF2's levels falter, compared to NOLF1, is their relative lack of variety. In NOLF1, every single mission was in a completely different location, with a lot more unique and exciting setpieces so that it felt like you were always doing different things in different environments. The sequel has significantly fewer levels in total, so it already has a lower potential for variety, but it's made even worse by the fact that you spend so much time in just two locations -- Siberia and India, which by themselves account for six of the game's 15 chapters -- with only brief detours to Japan, Antarctica, UNITY headquarters,
Akron Ohio, HARM's underwater base, HARM's artificial volcano lair, and
the island of Khios. Even within this selection, the UNITY HQ and Khios are only for a single scene, each, and Antarctica winds up feeling pretty similar to Siberia due to its snowy exteriors and bland facility interiors. That really only leaves you with six locations that feel unique, and that last for any significant amount of time, which is maybe less than half as many as we got in NOLF1.
With Siberia being the first full mission in the game, it seems like they put the most time and effort into developing these levels, and then realized they needed to pick up the pace for the rest off the missions if they were going to meet their schedule, and then scaled back on everything else. India is the next biggest section of the game, but it feels deliberately stretched out by reusing some of the same maps for multiple objectives -- you start out in the streets doing contact work for your HARM informant Kamal, and then you visit the HARM branch interior to bug someone's phone, then you're back out on the streets removing wanted posters, then you're in the theater sabotaging HARM's rival organization Evil Alliance, then you're back in the HARM branch trying to break into their secured vault, then you're back on the streets fighting HARM's bad guys, then you're in a ruined building trying to escape from Pierre's mimes, then you're back on the streets for the tricycle chase, and then a couple chapters later you're once again back on the streets rescuing civilians from super soldiers.
In fact, a lot of levels have a tendency to double their length by having you work your way through them to reach your primary objective, and then making you backtrack through the whole level again to get out while new enemies and obstacles have spawned to impede your progress. This makes thematic sense, of course, and it works especially well in Siberia where the entire first chapter is about setting things up that are meant to aid in your escape, but once I noticed it happening in so many of the other levels, it stopped feeling like a legitimate part of the mission structure and more like a quick and easy way to get extra run time from any given level. Some of the objectives even feel a bit like tedious busy work just there to artificially inflate the running time of that scene, like when you're having to put out fires in the streets of India by running back and forth filling buckets of water eight separate times, or when the underwater base has you running a series of literal fetch quests to get comically progressive stages of paperwork and permissions to access information from the supercomputer.
All-the-while, these levels lack a lot of the grand spectacle that made the ones in NOLF1 so memorable. Even the major setpieces can barely even compete; the only one that feels like it's even on the same level is escaping from the trailer park while a tornado is trashing trailers around, and eventually having to do a sword duel in a trailer that's been sucked up into the sky by the tornado. The underwater base has some good visuals and moments in it, especially when it branches into separate forks with a different scenario depending on which path you take, but the whole thing is just nowhere near as vibrant or exotic as the space station. I mean, there you've got the martini lounge, the park area, the zero-gravity chamber, the umbilical with the meteors hitting, dudes in spacesuits shooting lasers at you, and so many other little details that help to sell this as a unique environment. In the underwater base you've got... the submarine bay? An umbilical section that doesn't give you as good of a view, and where nothing exciting really happens? And a bunch of the same smooth metallic-gray walls everywhere? It's a neat environment, sure, but it's kind of drab in comparison.
After that we're left with.... riding a tricycle around the streets of India? Fighting a man in a wheelchair that shoots rockets at you over artificial lava? Escaping from a super soldier in an environment very similar to one you've already spent 15 scenes in previously? Escaping from a genre-appropriate over-engineered death trap by.... just welding off one cable? Escaping from another genre-appropriate over-engineered death trap by.... just waiting for it to break down? Breaking into a secured vault by.... easily disabling its genre-appropriate over-engineered death traps? Riding a snowmobile across an exploding bridge in Siberia? To be clear, these are all fun and entertaining sections in their own right -- I especially like the escape sequence in Antarctica cause it feels almost like something out of a horror game, and the low-speed tricycle chase is unique and memorable, but otherwise I just really struggle to think of stand-out moments in NOLF 2 that would remotely compare to falling out of an exploding plane and having to fight off paratroopers while catching up to a guy to steal his parachute in time, or exploring a sunken freighter while avoiding sharks and speargun-wielding divers, or riding a motorcycle through the jungle so you can hitch a ride on a rocket up to a space station after escaping from a blast pit test launch.
None of the levels in NOLF2 are as unique as the train, airplane, under-construction building, night club, alpine castle, or the indigenous ruins, while other environments just feel like remixed rehashes of similar things we've already seen and done in NOLF1, like escaping from a sinking vessel as the structures collapse and flood in NOLF1, and then escaping from a sinking vessel as the structures collapse and flood in NOLF2. You likewise break into a vault with high-tech security in both games, but I found dodging infrared laser beams in NOLF1 way more engaging and visually interesting than flipping a switch to disable the next death pad in NOLF2. There's also only one mission in the entire game where you have to blend in with civilians or go undercover; only one mission with a vehicle; a lot less meeting up with informants; and no interviewing or interrogating suspects or having boss-battle-style dialogue sequences. So the gameplay feels a little less varied as well since you're almost always in typical stealth-action gameplay, or exploring environments to solve simple adventure-style puzzles.
One interesting thing about NOLF2's levels is the fact that they included a multiplayer co-op campaign, in which you play as a sort of "clean up crew" sent to perform extra objectives in each of the single-player maps sometime after Cate has already been through the area. For example, your first mission is to rescue Cate from the Japanese village after she's left for dead at the end of the single-player mission, by first locating her unconscious body and then carrying it through the level to an extraction point. This is a neat concept just having coop in general, but also to see them create yet another type of scenario out of these same levels, but I personally had no one to play it with and frankly had no desire to run a multiplayer campaign by myself in these same levels I had just gone through in single-player, so I really can't comment on their quality.
The final thing to note with NOLF2 is all the obvious upgrades to the Lithtech engine, which renders the game with far, far better detail than NOLF1. At this point in time, both games look pretty dated, but NOLF1 looks especially old, whereas NOLF2 I feel holds up a lot better with its more realistic-looking character models and more detailed animations for everything. The cutscenes, for example, are a lot more interesting to watch because the characters are actually showing expression with their eyes and body language, in addition to having actual lip-syncing for their speech. Of course the higher poly-counts, better lighting, higher-resolution textures, and all of that jazz helps with all of the environments and weapon effects, too. I suspect this may be why NOLF2 feels somewhat rushed and under-developed, however -- because of all the extra detail, I would guess that it took them longer to create each map and each cutscene, and thus maybe couldn't afford to make as many as they could with NOLF1.
Now, it may seem as though I've been fairly negative towards NOLF2, but I have to stress that it still retains a lot of the same charming appeal that made the first game so worthwhile while also greatly improving on a lot of the gameplay in the process. It's just that some aspects of the story, setting, and humor don't land as strongly, while the whole game seems somewhat rushed with less total content and less interesting variety. At the end of the day, it's still a good game, and if you enjoy NOLF1 then it's almost a sure bet you'll enjoy NOLF2, possibly even more depending on what you value more in these games.
Contract JACK
Contract JACK, dubbed on the back of the box as "the official prequel to GameSpy's 2002 PC Game of the Year No One Lives Forever 2," is essentially a stand-alone expansion for NOLF2
in which you play as some dude named Jack, hired by HARM's Dmitrij
Volkov to kill some dude named Il Pazzo from some rival criminal organization named Danger Danger. None of the story really matters
because it's not connected to the NOLF series in any way, apart
from the presence of Volkov and one minor side character from the
streets of India, plus the general 1960's setting and the premise of working for HARM. You see a
few wanted posters bearing Cate's image, and you even catch a glimpse
of her during one of the missions, but otherwise it's a completely
separate storyline. The "amazing cliff-hanger that sets the stage for NOLF2,"
as the back of the box advertises, is an utterly tiny, insignificant
detail that implies how Volkov got hurt during his skiing trip, which was originally just a meaningless, comical throw-away line from Volkov.
I won't bother going into too much detail on this one, because Contract JACK is rubbish -- it's a complete departure from everything that made the NOLF games so great. The skills system from NOLF2
is gone, there's no more hunting for amusing bits of intelligence, way
fewer guard dialogues, no more gadgets, no more stealth, no more
infiltration, no more mingling with civilians, no more humor, no more
exploration, and no more Cate. No more having an interesting protagonist
we care about, either -- Jack's completely silent and emotionless
throughout virtually the entire game, and we learn nothing about his
backstory whatsoever. It's basically a mindless action shooter in the NOLF setting so that Monolith could recycle a bunch of assets and cash in on the relative success and popularity of NOLF2 for a quick and easy dollar. You use mostly all of the same weapons from NOLF2, and you see a lot of the same environments, models, and textures from NOLF2, with even the same music. After hearing that Siberia music on endless repeat during NOLF2,
I died a little inside when I had to listen to it all over again in
Czechoslovakia, and it was a little hard to feel excited about being on
the moon base when I immediately recognized the underwater base music
playing.
So it's no NOLF game, but even when treating it as a
straightforward action game, it's dull and frustrating. The first two levels give the impression that maybe it's going to be a fun run-and-gun shooter where you're just racing down hallways blasting enemies that appear in front of you, or a fun tactical shooter with complex arenas where you have to fight off waves of enemies that can spawn from all different directions; but afterward it devolves into frustrating tedium with obnoxious monster-closet level design where enemies spawn from behind locked doors to ambush you in your blind spots and come popping out from every corner with every step you take through a level and every action you take, in levels that are so cramped that there's no room to run around and no interesting features to shoot around, where you're sort of forced to hide behind every corner and inch your way forward all the time just so as not to get decimated by the constant ambushes or be left exposed to enemy gunfire due to all the open corridors. Enemies, meanwhile, have no concept for self-preservation, blindly
charging around corners in a conga line even after seeing a dozen of their comrades
get mowed down, while also being bullet sponges soaking up tons of bullets before going down. It's actually insane how many bullets you fire in a given mission, as you'll be firing literally thousands of rounds while killing hundreds of dudes, which is a stark contrast to some of the end-of-mission stats you can get from NOLF2. There are some hidden secrets to discover in the level design as well, some of which are kind of clever, but most of which are just typical FPS-exploration stuff, like thinking to jump on top of some crates or crawling through an optional vent.
On the bright side, Monolith finally put some damn weapons on the vehicles, a feature that was sorely lacking in both NOLF1 and NOLF2
-- it was always really clunky and awkward having to stop the vehicles and get
off just to fire your gun for a few seconds, and then get back on -- and so it just works a lot better to have auto-targeting guns mounted onto the vehicles that you can fire off as you race around on them. That level where you're riding a scooter through the
Italian countryside, trying to catch up to Il Pazzo as he rides a
gondola down the river, is kind of a fun change of pace from the typical
scenery of NOLF1 and NOLF2, as well, which I appreciate. The other stand-out level is the moon base, which is basically the only
level where you do anything besides shoot hundreds of dudes; it
has a little bit of light puzzle-solving going on in a more non-linear map, with needing to find key items or do things in the environment to unlock progress to different areas, with the possible need to back-track or find alternate routes around locked paths depending on how you choose to explore the level. And it's got some good visuals and atmosphere (or technically lack of atmosphere) with walking around the surface
of the moon, seeing the earth in the sky above you, and the
sequence where you're floating through space bouncing off the debris
from the exploded moon base fighting off assailants in space suits is actually one of the best setpieces of the entire series. Plus, these levels introduce the only new weapons to the equation, besides the desert eagle in the first level, with the automatic laser rifle and energy cannon, which are actually moderately entertaining.
These levels are genuinely pretty fun, to the point that I'd say it's almost worth playing Contract JACK just for them; it's not a very long campaign, being only seven chapters across three or four hours of total playtime, so it doesn't take too much time to get to. And then after those space missions you're on the home stretch in Italy, which does at least have the pleasant drive in the countryside and a somewhat unique final boss battle arming cannons to shoot at Il Pazzo who's holding up in a manor shooting at you from a distance. But my god, the rest of the gameplay is pretty unbearable to sit through, and the game overall is unremarkable except to say how bad it is, so maybe just seeing my footage here would be good enough to not have to play it yourself. These days, as tangentially part of the NOLF series, it's really not worth playing unless you just have a completionist mindset, or else have some curiosity about how a NOLF game could've turned out without its staple emphasis on story, characters, thematic objectives, hidden intelligence, spy gadgetry, stealth, and humor. In their absence, Contract JACK is effectively just a generic, run-of-the-mill shooter, and not a very good one, either.
In Conclusion
The No One Lives Forever series is truly one of the more unique shooters to come from the early 2000s, and despite their age showing in some fairly obvious ways, I feel like they still hold up extremely well, even 20-plus years later. The graphics are technically pretty dated, but they're still pleasant to look at thanks to the wide variety of locales and a lot of vibrant 1960's stylings, and while the gameplay is relatively crude by today's standards, with some notable rough edges in each game that admittedly weren't great even back then, it's more than serviceable enough to carry each game's full running time. The games' most notable features, like the story, humor, characters, atmosphere, setpieces, and environments, are timelessly enjoyable and worth experiencing for the first time even today, if you haven't already played these wonderful games. And if it's been a while since you've played them, then it may be worth a replay to remind yourself just how special these games are.
As I mentioned previously, the licensing rights for the NOLF games are
locked in copyright hell (or more accurately, in a box buried in a
basement somewhere that no one is willing to take the effort to locate)
and so you can't buy them on any modern digital distribution service.
However, as of 2016, the whole series has been available for free
download via community revival projects with fan-made compatibility
patches to make them work on modern systems, so they're incredibly easy
to access and actually work really well on Windows 10, at least in my
experience. And since whoever owns the copyright has made no effort in
the last eight years to take these versions down, or offered any sort of
legal alternative, these games have been effectively relegated to
abandonware status, and thus downloading these versions is somewhat
justified, although I would still encourage everyone to buy physical
copies if you're able to track them down. It's possible that whoever owns the rights may eventually decide to dig up the paperwork and greenlight a remaster, a remake, or a legacy sequel of some kind, but that's unlikely to ever happen without enough public interest and maybe a little luck and determination from an adamant developer who's deadset on the license, so keeping the memory of these games alive and spreading the word is the least we can do as gamers to try to make that happen.
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