No One Lives Forever or NOLF is a stealth shooter hybrid from 2000 made by Monolith. It's a retro 60s spy setup that's clearly taking leads from Austin Powers. I remember playing the demo of this at the time and it not running well and me not liking it much either. A poor review in PCZone which was gospel for me back then meant I never bothered playing it although I did play and love the sequel along with many other of Monolith's games. With that in mind I thought why not give it a second chance to see if I missed out on a classic as seems to be the opinion of many people these days. Spoiler alert, I still do not like this game.

First impressions weren't good, the game is heavy on story but it's not a good or well told story with boring dialogue and voice acting that ranges form passable to awful. This was somewhat common at the time but in comparison to Max Payne which would be released about 6 months later this game is so far off in terms of storytelling. Once you get to the gameplay the opening mission has you wandering aimlessly until you get to where you need to be and are given your first combat encounter which is nothing but a shooting gallery followed by back tracking through where you've just come from.

Once you complete the first mission you'll be back at HQ for another boring briefing, a trip to the lab to get a new gadget and then off to the next mission. This is the pattern the game falls into and it gets irritating quickly. The briefings can go on for so long, I timed once and it clocked in at 6 minutes. 6 minutes of the camera swapping between the faces of characters standing in place delivering their lines with no music or action to spice things up. Incredibly tedious. The missions themselves have some great variety and set pieces but are often big mazes for you to wander around until you find the objectives, they reminded me a lot of Perfect Dark which I replayed a few years ago. You get a objection of "Disable the power" and that's it. Just wander around until you find the place where you can disable the power with there often being little to guide you towards that objective.

The game has a bunch of interesting gadgets that you barely get the chance to use. You'll get a few for getting past padlocks with different lock types needing a different gadget but these are always on the critical path and amount to holding a button to get past them so they don't feel very special. There was one gadget I got a tutorial on that I literally used once and gadgets like the spray for removing dead bodies are rarely useful due to the way the gameplay unfolds. There was one gadget I had to complete a tutorial for that I then used once and while you can replay missions with gadgets you wouldn't have had first time through the rewards just aren't really worth it. Gadgets like the one for disabling the camera are introduced quite late in the game too and again feel mandatory for certain missions and not something that would make you want to replay earlier missions. I thought the gadget for auto-cracking keypads was the most interesting and it's the most used. You put one on a keypad then have to wait for it to crack the code but there's never any tension to this you end up just stood beside it waiting. I imagined a patrolling guard where you have to find a gap to put it on and then hide until it's complete but nope, just more time wasting. It is again an essential gadget to the extent that later levels are littered with spares in case you've forgotten to retrieve it.

The stealth aspect of this game is completely pointless and the few missions where it's mandatory are insufferable. The big problem is that enemies will just randomly detect you for seemingly no reason or a camera will see you through a wall leading to an instant fail. You could argue this is a case of when it was released but games like Thief and Deus Ex were already out and doing stealth much better. In the missions where stealth is optional it can be fun to paly along with the charade until it inevitable falls apart and you resort to a shoot out, the combat isn't much more fun than the stealth but it's definitely less annoying. Enemies are prone to run along th exact same path for you to easily pick them off one by one and you'll probably die more to the odd bad platforming section.

I've been quite negative but there are things to like about this game. The art style is quite nice most of the time and as I said the levels have some great set pieces. Escaping a sinking ship, jumping out of an airplane and sky diving to safety are 2 stand outs. There are loads of great ideas too that games would later go on to do well and I can imagine it being a real inspiration at the time. Even now it was for me and there are a few things the game tries that I would like to implement in a game I'm working on. There are vehicle sections too! In an FPS from 2000! Good ideas though can't make up for a game that was just rarely fun to play. Perhaps if I was a fan of it at the time the rose tinted glasses would help but I wasn't and it's not something I'd recommend playing today.