The name's not quite Bond, James not quite Bond. In a retro back to the '60s, Fox Interactive presents us with a first person shooter ripped from the pages of every spy novel and movie you can think of. You play Cate Archer, a young hippie female who's turned from a life of crime to a life of spying (or to be rhythmically correct - spime) for a British intelligence organization known as U.N.I.T.Y. A unique collection of the world's supervillians have joined together and formed a group known as H.A.R.M. in their ongoing efforts to take over the world (when will they learn that "the world is not enough?"). Cate's "license to kill" comes in quite handy as she treks across the world in an effort to bring HARM to it's knees.

Shaun Connery ("The good points")
The game itself is broken up into 15 separate missions each subdivided further into a series of one or more scenes. Though most scenes tend to degenerate into straight shoot-em' up sequences, there are many scenes that combine elements of stealth and sniping. A few of these scenes include the following: protecting an ambassador, getting civilians off the street in the midst of a firefight, swimming through a sunken ship to retrieve intelligence items, falling out of a plane without a parachute (and acquiring a parachute from another person in freefall), rescuing a scientist, sneaking into a vault protected by security cameras, personnel, and laser trip wires, and of course assignation. The locales are meticulously constructed right down to the water fountains (which sadly don't work) and drywall in construction zones. Every texture imaginable has been recreated to make each level both unique and quite believable.

Though the music is lacking in areas (that is to say most of the time it isn't playing) the developers have more then made up for this through the use of dynamic cues during gameplay. For instance you may kill a guard with your sniper riffle and be rewarded with a small musical overscore. The music also takes on a more serious tone as you approach an enemy thus making the mood of the game quite creepy at times. One slight flaw, however, is that the music will sometimes change tones too early thus inadvertently alerting you to the presence of a guard nearby.

The AI is passable but tends to run the gamut between guards that can hear a pin drop from 2000 yards and those who wouldn't flinch if a nuclear bomb was dropped in their back yard. The AI death sequences combined with the many zoomed riffles bring a new meaning to "a view to a kill" though (head, limb, and body shots are also tallied at the end of each mission), promoting both realism and replayability. Also you will often approach two AI guards in the midst of a conversation which boosts the game's realism factor. Fans of the game "Thief" will be disappointed however as the AI can see Cate even when crouched in the shadows of buildings. The game does make good use of sound, though, as Cate can toss a coin onto the ground to lure an unsuspecting guard into a quiet corner to kill them.

Roger Moore ("The bad points")
While on the whole NOLF's designers seem to have a "Goldeneye," there are several glaring flaws in the game engine itself. As is the case with most new game engines, textures are created with several levels of detail (LOD) where scaled down (and less memory munching) versions of each texture are applied to polygons off in the distance. Normally this process is hardly visible to the player as objects in real life tend to get blurry the farther they are from you. Unfortunately the designers of NOLF could write an entire paper on what textures do not lend themselves well to LOD. One level in particular (Misfortune in Morocco - Scene 2) I found I was being constantly distracted by the floor tiles as they were composed of a flower pattern. As I walked across the floor, my eyes kept being drawn to the exact line where the highest LOD met with a lower LOD (several pedals were removed from the lower level of detail which kept giving the floor a sense of motion as you walk).

The next glaring engine flaw would have to be the high system requirements needed to get a realistic look. To turn on all the bells and whistles in the game, the designers recommend a 700 MHz system though the absolute minimum system requirement (all the bells and whistles off) is a 300 MHz system. Despite not being able to run the game at its highest degree of detail I can say just from what I have seen that not much will change. While most surfaces look fine, the more complex objects such as cars, actors, and trash cans (or any round surfaces -- c'mon guys, I'm a third year programmer and even I know the algorithm for subdividing surfaces to make them appear rounded) are downright ugly and only serve to pull the player back out into the real world rather then submerse them in a fictitious world.

The cutscenes are horrible. I know that many of the hard-core gaming magazines cry out loud about games getting rid of full motion video cutscenes and use in-game engine scenes instead, but when your in-game engine churns out characters that look like something from Gumby's closet it's time to look for alternatives. I have never seen anything wrong with FMV cutscenes, in fact I've always looked at them as a reward for a job well done. Many purists will argue that it promotes disbelief and reminds players that they are sitting in front of a computer screen (no need, my poor eyesight always reminds me of that) yet I haven't seen anyone complain about the cutscenes in the Wing Commander games....

This next point isn't actually a flaw but rather a beef -- the mouse "look/aim" feature. Thanks to my new optical mouse this has no longer become an issue, however I used to never buy games that employed this mouse aim feature. The reason: "Diamonds are forever" but mouse track balls aren't. Anyone who routinely bounces their mouse along the pad to keep it from sticking knows what I'm talking about. "Live and let die" I say.

The missions in NOLF are way too long. In fact I'll go so far as to say the designers purposely stretched the missions out both so the engine wouldn't have to handle large maps and to artificially extend the life of the product. What would normally be 100 hours of enjoyability (may have to check the unabridged dictionary to see if that word exists) is now extended to 300 hours just to make it through the game the first time -- let alone replay it. I don't mind going out and kicking some megalomaniac's butt but if it means I must see every nook and cranny of the castle of "Dr. No," I'll pass.

Any gaming magazine reader has heard the term "jumping puzzles." The kiddy games such as Mario employ this regularly as you must jump from platform to platform. While NOLF thankfully doesn't have any jumping puzzles, it has what I term "falling puzzles." More often then not you are placed on the roof of a building with your objective being to get to the ground floor via a series of extremely small ledges along a wall (one mission in particular: "Man of Influence - Scene 4" where you are in a building under construction). To say that this is annoying would be an understatement. Just make an elevator and be done with it.

Two quick final points. Multiplayer is useless, supporting only straight deathmatch or "HARM vs. UNITY" where each team must snap a picture of one anothers' intelligence briefcase. Normally "for your eyes only" would be appealing, but not in this sense. Two vehicles are also used in the game: a motorcycle and snowmobile. These were obviously thrown in at the last minute to give the game a "wow" factor. The vehicles do not handle correctly and are not employed in a manner that enhances gameplay.

Obvious Bugs
-The ripcord belt extension will pass right through walls causing a very short ride as you smack head-on into a pillar.
-The engine makes use of small ledges for it's falling puzzles, unfortunately the person who designed the laser tripwire vault in "Man of Influence - Scene 6" didn't take this into account. I was able to exploit this by jumping onto the wall to avoid the beams all together.
-Another scene in the "Man of Influence" mission has a bug where you can climb up and down the ladder in the elevator shaft even though you are inside the elevator.

Mods
A map/tile editor is available from NOLF's website (http://www.the-operative.com). While there are instructions included to create a very simple map, none of the more advanced features are covered. If you've never created a mod before, this package isn't for you. The editor requires a Full install of the game as well as another 700 megs of free space to uncompress all of the maps/textures/sounds, etc. used in the game. It also requires the 1.02 patch, see below.

Replayability
Single player game: 340 hours of playing time (300 required to make it through the entire game once)
Multiplayer game: 20 MINUTES. "You only live twice" why waste one life on this.

Patches/Updates
Both a 1.01 and 1.02 patch have been released (http://www.the-operative.com). The 1.02 patch is required if you wish to create your own multiplayer maps. Both patches fix various bugs in the multiplayer game and are not worth the effort. If you do decide to download the 1.02 patch BEWARE, none of your saved games are compatible with it (however the "auto-saved" game will still function).

Final Assessment
I feel that NOLF would have been a great game had it not been held back by the Lithtech engine. Most problems I've outlined relate to obvious flaws in this engine. Perhaps if the designers had licensed the Quake III engine things would have been different. If "tomorrow never dies" then the Lithtech engine is yesterday's news.

Tim Connolly is a Computer Science student who loves to point a "Goldfinger" at obvious mistakes in his brethrens' works. For those of you keeping score, there are 10 references to James Bond movies in this article (including the title which is a take on the movie "octopussy") thus giving it a replayability factor.


Recommended: Yes