Stylish Shooter Takes You Back to Days of U.N.C.L.E.
Written: Jun 09 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Highly creative missions, interesting enemies, colorful graphics, humor, good controls.
Cons: Stealth play is too difficult. Many hangs and crashes, very long load times.
The Bottom Line: Not in Deus Ex's class, but still a very lively, original game that offers at least a couple of different approaches to each game situation.
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| dreamshark's Full Review: No One Lives Forever for Windows |
This spy caper is a very classy game in the tradition of Half-Life and Deus Ex: a story-driven FPS with a stealth component. You play as Cate Archer, an improbably sexy cat burglar turned international spy, who waltzes through 16 long missions without ever losing her cool. The whole thing is set in the cartoony alternate universe inhabited by '60's spy heroes like James Bond and the Man from U.N.C.L.E. The story is pretty trivial - colorful supervillains with eye patches and signature assassination styles are planning something horribly evil and you have to stop them. Whatever. The real story is actually the vicious office politics within U.N.I.T.Y.
Controls
The mechanics of the game are very much derived from Half-Life, which is good. When something works, why change it? Almost every control can be customized to use any keyboard key and up to 3 buttons + wheel on the mouse. The only mouse setting I couldn't seem to change was the middle button, which must be used for reload or not used at all. A mouse wheel comes in REALLY handy in this game - it's hard to decide whether to use it for zoom in/out or to cycle back and forth through the weapons. I went with the zoom, and set Q and E for prev-weapon/next-weapon. The default key mappings of WSAD work just fine for forward-back-left-right. For some reason, a lot of useful functions were mapped by default to awkward keys on the right side of the keyboard. I always change everything to the left side so I can mouse with the right hand. The only keys that couldn't be remapped were quicksave (F6) and quickload (F9). But at least the game HAS a quicksave/load function, unlike some I could mention! There are tons of tuning controls to tinker with:
various aspects of the graphics, mouse sensitivity, etc. I turned the head-bob and weapon-sway way down, which made the game much more pleasant to play.
System requirements and stability
I played on a 2-year-old Dell Dimension with a 700Mhz CPU. Things ran acceptably with all the graphics turned up to the highest resolution, but occasionally lagged a little in fast-paced scenes. There are so many options available for tweaking the graphics level that I would think the game could be made to run well on almost any computer. On the negative side, I was surprised by the lack of stability. I experienced a crash or hang every hour or two, often requiring the computer to be rebooted. I hoped that upgrading to the latest patch level (1.0.0.4) would help, but I can't say that it did. Level load times were also surprisingly long.
Gripes
-Stealth play is too hard. It is almost impossible to play through a level without setting off an alarm unless you save and retry numerous times at each turn of the game. Sometimes guards seem to see through walls, or hear things that are clearly out of range. There's no strong incentive to minimize enemy casualties; it turns out to be pretty easy to just blast your way through every level with the alarms blaring. So that's what I ended up doing, reluctantly. I was disappointed with this aspect of the game, especially compared to Thief or Deus Ex where stealth play is encouraged and more consistently supported.
_For no good reason, you are severely limited in how many gadgets and firearms you can take on a mission, although there is no limit to how many weapons you can pick up when you stumble across them. This makes no sense, especially when the "gadgets" are things like barettes and belt buckles that were designed not to take up any space in inventory. There aren't many opportunities to use most of the gadgets anyway, and it's annoying when an opportunity arises and you don't have the gadget.
-All the levels are littered with "intelligence items" that you are apparently supposed to be collecting - but why? The items you pick up aren't good for anything, you can't even look at them in inventory or keep track of how many you've found, and you aren't rewarded for collecting them. Some of them give you a bit of back story, but most of them aren't even good for that. There should have been some sort of reward for collecting this stuff - maybe an extra gadget for your next mission.
-Sound is not directional. There is a little bit of volume modulation to suggest how far away an enemy is, but it's not very consistent, and there is no way to tell which direction the sound is coming from.
Good stuff
-The wide variety of missions is the strong point of this game. The levels aren't small either - you get a lot for your money here.
-The enemies are really fun. In many games of this type, guards and other cannon fodder repeat the same phrases over and over, or simply stand around staring glassily into space. These guys wander around muttering and carry on highly entertaining conversations among themselves. They are also much smarter than the typical non-player bozos, even on level EASY. They dive for cover, yell for help, and go on the alert when they find bodies lying around. I just wish I didn't have to kill them all - more non-lethal weapons would have been very welcome.
-Background graphics are excellent - unusually brightly colored and crisply drawn. The surface textures and lighting may not be as sophisticated as in some of the other game engines, but it's nice to see a color palette with something in it besides murky browns and grays.
-The humor can be either a plus or a minus, depending on your taste. I found some of the cut scenes with the over-the-top villains tedious rather than amusing. On the other hand, the overheard conversations and many of the intelligence items were funny, so I'll call it a plus.
Tips
__Be sure to download and apply all the patches before you start playing. Games saved on V1.0 cannot be accessed once you upgrade! The patches mostly fix multi-player problems, but there are some single-player enhancements and fixes. If nothing else, the game starts up a lot quicker with the patches - 2 of the 3 logo sequences have been eliminated.
__Ammo and equipment found during a mission doesn't carry over to the next mission.
__Always take the sniper rifle with you if you can. You find pistols and machine guns along the way, but never a sniper rifle. But be careful not to use up the rifle ammo too soon - there's not much of that lying around either. The long pistol is surprisingly effective at picking off enemies at a distance, so save the rifle for times when you really need the scope. If you get down to your last .45 bullet, save it. That way you can still use the scope on the rifle to look around. Once the last bullet is gone, you can no longer select the weapon.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dreamshark
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Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Reviews written: 11
Trusted by: 2 members
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