Posted By: bigmamma1
Noone Lives Forever: the operative - 12/10/04 05:54 PM
If you enjoy action games and you havn't played this one, you've missed a treat. Released in 2000, this "action game of the year" is well deserving of that award.You will find yourself back in the 60's super spy era in the heat of the cold war. You are Kate Archer a beautiful, extraordinary(of course!) woman who has to fight harder for recognition than her male colleagues-after all, this is the 60's. A covert operative for UNITY, an organisation dedicated to saving the world from dangerous enemies that are so secretive and so bad that noone even knows they exist.
Your task is to find out what a nefarious organisation called H.A.R.M. is up to and stop it before the world gets destroyed.
This is a vast game to get through, with 15 action packed missions. You start out in Morocco, then to East Berlin,Germany,and the Caribbean, where you'll have to find your way in and out of a sunken ship, and to secret hideout in the frozen Alps. Along the way you'll have to figure out how to get out of an airliner that's 20,000 ft up and about to go down, how to get around a lazer beam trap, or escaping from a stalled gondola car high in the Alps, and other such challenges.And there's also the gas chamber trap and the shark pool.
Of course you'll have to defeat lots of enemies, mostly guards.If you sneak up on them you will hear humorous conversations mostly with funny German accents about cheating wives, problems with girlfriends, opinions about events of the day and one really hilarious one about the pros and cons of beer drinking.
Before each mission Kate is given a briefing by her bosses at UNITY and trained for new gadgets-a lipstick bomb, a barrette lock-pick, a cigarette lighter propane torch, dark glasses that can detect land mines,a belt buckle that has a pop-out climbing rope for those hard-to-reach places.Of course there are numerous kinds of weapons to choose for each mission and the ones you find along the way from dead enemies.
The game has plenty of action other than shooting and relies a lot on stealth. You are bumped out of the game if you kill a civilian. There are many cut-scenes in between missions to explain the story and provide a rest from the tension of the action parts.The dialogue is always entertaining with a good sprinkling of humor. The characters are amusing and colorful too.
Kate will have to contend with some formidable women enemies as well as men: There's Inge Wagner, a self-obsessed grossly overweight neurotic and failed opera singer. Baroness Dumont, a nafariously wicked aristocrat who clawed her way out of a disadvantaged childhood.The mysterious red dress ladies, who suddenly materialise into grenade throwing nightmares.
The gameplay is keyboard(to choose things from inventory and W,S,A&D for direction and mouse(to control action)You can roam freely through the environment and fall of things to your death,and jump up or across to ledges, ect. But alot of it is using your wits to find things or figure out how to evade security cameras and guards. Not all jumping and climbing ala Tomb Raider.
The only fault I found with the game controls was the awkwardness of getting the gadgets from inventory;you have to file through them one by one until the right one comes up instead of having a # for each one. Consequently if you want to use a gadget you can't be in the heat of a battle or in a vulnerable spot. Most of the weapons however do have #s and show up on the right side of the screen for easy access.I played the game on WIN XP with no problems except for installation, where I had to manually change 2 files from the CDs. Instructions for this are on the NOLF website.
An enthusiastic
for this one!