No One Lives Forever
Score: 91% ESRB: Teen Publisher: Sierra Developer: Monolith Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 Genre: First Person Shooter/ Adventure
Graphics & Sound: No One Lives Forever is lookin' good on the PS2. Crisp levels filled with detail are what awaits the FPS fan who picks up this gem. The characters look good and are really over the top in appearance and attitude, but what shines so brightly about No One Lives Forever is the sound. How can it make that much of a difference, you might ask? Everything from the voice-overs to the ambient music and sound effects and most importantly, the chatter, is simply fantastic. If you rush through the game, you'll miss some of the best conversations I've ever heard in a videogame. Trust me, it's just that good. Oh, and the dialogue specifically in Berlin by Night had me rolling. Good evening, Fraulien. Do you make love to strangers? Certainly not! Well, allow me to introduce myself. Hehe. It's good stuff.
Gameplay: You assume the role of the lovely Cate Archer, one time cat burglar turned super-spy. Well, sort of. Her superiors view her as impetuous and inept, but as someone seems to be offing their agents all over the world, she is needed to combat the nefarious group, H.A.R.M. There's a groovy little training area that helps to get you accustomed to the controls, weapons and the different gadgets at your disposal. From time to time, you'll find yourself back here when new items are introduced. Although this is an FPS, it's not a frantic Quake style FPS, but more of a Medal of Honor styled game. Stealth is very important and is required in certain areas of the game. Cate's missions range from protecting a government idiot (um, I mean official) to plucking a research scientist from the bowels of a secret lab to strutting through a nightclub and more. The levels are varied and never get boring, if only for the funny conversations you'll hear as you progress. I was especially fond of the pickpocketing level that takes place some years earlier. Good fun. Cate has a number of different weapons at her disposal, although I found myself sticking to one or two guns in particular. Her gadgets are many in numbers as well, such as lipstick explosives, sleeping gas perfume, coins to throw to distract someone and so on. However, more often than not, I personally didn't use them.
Difficulty: No One Lives Forever is not an easy game. It's not one that you will run through in a matter of hours. There's plenty of gaming goodness to be found here. However, you can turn on/off certain features that will increase the difficulty such as auto-aim. There are also 3 difficulty settings, so the game is fairly configurable in this department. Ok, well the scene where you are free-falling in the air, attempting to catch up to the guy with a parachute below you so you can steal it, all the while being shot at by other parachuting minions (who are disturbingly accurate with their shots even though they are free-falling) is hard. Crazy hard and not fun. Plus, you can't really speed up to catch up to the guy, but rather, you just have to wait it out and survive. Ugh. But the rest of the game is ok. ;)
Game Mechanics: Ahh, let's talk about control, shall we? This was my main beef with the game. It's really one particular button, actually. The Left analog stick (R3) when pressed down, turns Cate around. She does a complete about-face. Sure, a worthy control feature and one I've used before. Many times, in fact. But I found that having that feature assigned to R3 was a big pain in the ass. When I was caught in a firefight and trying to, well, live, many times that turn-around button would come back to bite me in the ass. I found it really easy to hit it by mistake as I was manipulating Cate. Yes, it gets better over time, but still, its a problem. So I thought I'd change the controller config. Yes, you can do that, but guess what? R3 stays the same on all configurations. ARGH! So I adapted, but wasn't too happy about it. The game sports really long load times at the beginning of a level. I am talking -make a sandwich- load times, but the levels looks so good, I suppose its worth it. I did notice a couple of instances of slowdown when I was involved in a shootout and once at the beginning of a level, but they are few and far between. There are Intelligence Items scattered throughout the levels and by picking these up, you can rack up bonuses. It's for the completists out there as I really didn't see any major benefit to getting them or not. However, picking them up does provide a few laughs as the memos and such are usually pretty funny. One notable is that you never pick up health, but rather body armor. So once you are down to hardly any health, there's no turning back (until you get to a new level). Also, I don't recommend you save in the middle of a level because you will still have to repeat the entire level if you die, and if you happen to be very low on health (and didn't notice that before you saved), you will be in a world of hurt. Doh! Overall, No One Lives Forever is a great game and I really enjoyed it. I still am enjoying it, as a matter of fact. It's got action, stealth, violence, comedy and sex. Who could ask for anything more? Do yourself a favor and check it out.
-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins
Medal of Honor: Rising Sun Portal Runner