No One Lives Forever Review

The main villains frpm the H.A.R.M. organization are just as lively, especially the huge Scott, Magnus Armstrong, and the fat shrieking German lady, Mrs. Wagner (yeah, she sings like a fat pig in its final moments). Boy, you just gotta check out the dialogues between those two... Fatty-Drunk-Fatty-Drunk... ahh, never mind, I know it doesn't sound funny when I write it; you'll have to play the game and witness it for yourself. And there's always that one arch-nemesis that has a personal grudge against the heroine, like the dreaded Dimitri Volkov - H.A.R.M.'s number one hit man! With its full-of-life characters and top quality voice acting, the game fuses all the classic entertainment media elements into a seamless movie going experience. All the technicalities like the 3D engine eye candy, and the rest of the usual PC gaming stuff fall to second place in comparison to that.

Speaking of the game's technical issues... I'm glad to say that the enemy AI works like a goddamn charm! They hear sounds, see you, exhibit extremely intelligent path finding, run when they're hurt, and hit alarm buttons... NOLF AI has to be one of the game's stronger tech-points, and we all know how important that is for a great FPS game. I mean, the game wouldn't be as fun if the bad guys kept hitting walls and shooting each other, would it? Fortunately, there's absolutely none of that in NOLF. AI coding is a real tribute and a great reference of the quality of the overall design. The only thing that I can think of that bothered me during gameplay were the relatively steep hardware requirements in comparison to the number of polys of some of the models; especially of the cars and the interiors. LithTech 2.5 is a great ambient engine, meaning that it features some awesome lighting and some mighty crisp textures (it has enough power to propel an interactive movie, and that should tell you something), but that comes at an expense of a whole lot of compromises.

The number of polys used for certain models (not that Mrs. Archer needs any; she looks quite sexy, thank you very much) is extremely low and it makes them look ridiculously blocky (just take a look at any automobile in the game). I played the game on a 900MHz T-bird with a GeForce 2 MX, and 256Mb of RAM, and the FPS count dropped as low as 10FPS in a couple of scenes. And we're talking 16-bit palette, 1024 res. here! Some of that can certainly be linked to the engine's relatively non-optimized 3D code, and the rest is probably due to its high-quality textures and reflections, but there's no way that the LithTech 2.5 engine is prettier from say, the Quake III engine, which runs at about 60FPS on my rig. In fact, from a pure technical standpoint, LithTech 2.5 seems like a somewhat unfinished product, and I guess unless Lith programmers spend some more time on it, it's going to be blown away once the new Epic and id codes hit the market.

But all this engine talk is beside the point really. The content is what matters, not just the visuals! And does NOLF ever have an excess of it! No One Lives Forever is every bit as charming as its lead heroine, and I can't wait for another game like it! Here, let me write that down --- pester NOLF designers into making another game; find Cate Archer nude patch... if one isn't available corner our code pimp Dex into making one... Find a girlfriend, you pathetic prick! Ahh... scratch that last one...