Review: No One Lives Forever (NOLF)

First-Person Shooter by Monolith and Fox Interactive

November 20, 2000 -- Review by Wraith

I played the demo. It was ok. Not great, not earth shattering, but ok. Ran like crud on my machine (my specs are at the bottom of this review), but it was fun. It's a good teaser for NOLF.

And I do mean teaser. The day after NOLF hit the shelves at my local Best Buy, I shelled out my hard earned $39.99 for it. Nobody gives me games for free, my articles aren't that popular. Most games aren't worth the money you paid for them (Daikatana, unless you picked it up for $9.99, is a good example [Ed. note: maybe if someone paid you to take it]).

This game was worth every single penny.

Some of you might call me biased. "But Wraith," you say, "You're a LithTech freak!" And you'd be partially right. I have a . . . fondness for LithTech. But Sanity (didn't buy it; opinion completely based on the demo) sucked. That was LithTech, too. There is a dark side and a light side to this engine.

If Sanity or Blood2 is the dark side, then No One Lives Forever is the light side.

I'm not going to go into plot line stuff, or a list of characters, or any of that. If you want that, read another review, read the box, read the game's website. I'm just gonna tell you about the cool stuff.

First off, weapons: Simply put, they rock. Hard. Really hard. And there are a lot of them. My only beef is that the Grenade Launcher (which works more like a Rocket Launcher) is a mite too powerful. The guns look cool, they shoot cool, and coolness abounds when something gets blown up.

Second, the enemy AI. It's nice to see bad guys that actually try to survive. They dodge, work together, and fire from cover. No more "just pick off the guards one by one with the sniper rifle" style of play (I'm looking at you, Mister Soldier of Fortune). If even one of those guys just hears a gun report, they'll tell the others and start looking for you (can you tell that I found this out, over and over again, the Hard Way ™?). It's often wiser to sneak past guards than to try and out-gun them.

Third, it's nice to see a first person shooter with a story that doesn't involve grabbing keys and killing large, nightmarish aliens. The scripted sequences in the game are a riot. The cutscenes in the game are done with the engine, so they're not as slick as in other games, but they do the job, and the lip synch stuff is cool. The game is also a pretty good length. You will not finish this in one session. It's a long ride, boys, but it's fun. . .

Now we come to the part where I brush away the cool stuff and start dissecting the game. Out with the scalpels! Hand me that saw!

Miscellaneous thoughts:

• Why the high system specs? I've got a pretty good system, and I didn't even get close to recommended specs for "High Quality". Good God, man. That's ridiculous. I am not upgrading for one game.
• This game's subtitle ought to be "No One Sucks Forever". This is the best release I've seen come out of Monolith since Shogo. That's saying a lot. The only Monolith games I like are Blood1, Shogo, and NOLF. Go figure. Jason Hall is finally putting some game where his mouth is.
• Mutiplayer is, well, shabby. Think Shogo, before the patch [Ed. note: Ouch!]. It looks like it was pretty much just popped in there at the last minute so they could say they had multiplayer. It seems fun enough. The weird CTF mutation team game is fun (instead of flags, you capture intelligence from your opposing team's base), and the vehicles in multiplay look kinda fun. The in-game server browser is nice. The netcode is just really cruddy. Let's hope a patch is coming.
• The current "realism" bug has kinda bitten NOLF. There is no such thing as "health" in game (at least, not as a pickup). If you take damage, you got it until the end of the level. Armor takes a good deal of the brunt, though. Falling damage is utterly silly. I don't know about you, but when I jump off of a milkcrate, it doesn't half kill me. That, boys and girls, is not realism; that is bad physics.
• The four types of ammunition are cool. Regular FMJ (full metal jacket), Dum Dums, Phosophorus, and Cyanide Tipped. And yes, you can mix and match. That is just too cool. If you're a fan of weapons mods, you're gonna love this game. There are add-ons for most of the guns and usually several different types of ammunition for each. The AK-47 with the Scope, locked and loaded with some Phosphorus rounds, is a thing to behold.
• The sound is pretty good. Not earth shattering, but it does the job. The music is kind of humorous. The sniper "zoom" noise sounds extactly the same as Shogo's.
• The graphics are nice. No, they're not Quake 3, nor Unreal Tournament. But it's not supposed to be. They look all right on my system. The deal here is the game, guys and dolls, not the eye-candy. Eye-candy only goes so far. Game goes a lot father.
• Now, this may be a bit off topic, but there are gonna be some very cool mods coming out of this game. Call it a feeling in my bones. I've already been contacted by several people to start working on mod concepts. Since the singleplayer is so fly, expect to see some singleplayer mods :-).

What's the final verdict? Stride to your local purveyor of software and demand your shiny slice 'o Lith! Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, and certainly do not buy Sanity. I don't care if it's $15. It's not worth it. Drop your hard earned coinage on this beast and get trapped by the single player game. C'mon. I dare ya. No One Lives Forever will have quite a long life on my hard drive, methinks. This one gets 4 out of 5 copies of the DeCSS source code.

Screenshots

System Specs-
433 Celeron
240MB RAM
Voodoo3 3500 @ 200mHz
Awe64 Sound Card
SMC EtherEZ 10MB ISA Ethernet Card
3COM 3C900 10/100MB PCI Ethernet Card

Wraith (wraith@planetquake.com, planetshogo.com, thehaus.net)