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It’s a tough job, and you’ll pick up a lot of frequent
flier miles—No One Lives Forever takes you to such settings
as Berlin, Morocco, the Alps, the Pacific Northwest, and the tropics.
Once in these locales, you’ll work your way through a series
of “scenes”--No One Lives Forever never forgets its cinematic
inspiration. Each of these scenes is like an episode from a Bond
movie; you’ll be presented some sort of sticky situation, and
you’ll have to find some ingenious way out of it.
 Well,
ingenious some of the time at least. As I noted above, No One Lives
Forever is a splendid combination of flat-out shooter and first-person
stealther. In some missions, going around with and AK-47 and blowing
away everything that moves will just about make everything all right.
But even then, you’re going to have to be a little more savvy
than usual. Circle-strafing will just make you dead pronto in this
game; to succeed, you’ll have to use cover and switch weapons
often. Other missions place a premium on avoiding detection and
figuring out puzzles. From reading the message boards, I see one
of the most common complaints about No One Lives Forever comes from
hardcore fraggers who can’t take the tedium involved in working
through the stealth missions, as if sneaking your way through a
compound full of movie cameras and guard dogs were the equivalent
of studying for an accounting exam. Ok, you guys, stick to Quake
III. I’m sure Quake IV will be along soon, and it’ll be
even prettier. Whoo-hoo! But for anyone with an attention span exceeding
how long it takes to read the last sentence, these scenes are a
pure joy. First, they take place in unexpected settings—on
a crippled jetliner, on a sinking ship, on a gondola besieged by
helicopters and most of all in the spacious, colorful, outdoors.
Secondly, these scenes have narrative-driven goals that make sense—not
just “run around until you find the button that lets you exit,
and oh yeah shoot all the crates that look a little different, because
there’s stuff in them.” (In a real coup for a first-person
shooter, there are no crates in No One Lives Forever—or at
least none with stuff in them.) Finally, the missions are very enjoyable;
with few exceptions, the puzzles themselves strike a nice balance—they’re
just difficult enough to get you thinking, and you can figure them
out by thinking.
 To
aid you in your missions, you’ll be given a wide variety of
gee-whiz spy technology circa 1966. Your lipstick collection, for
example, is really a cleverly concealed variety of hand grenades.
Sunglasses serve both to protect your eyes from the sun and as a
camera, mine detector, and infrared vision device. Your barrette?
A lock pick. Your lighter? A welding torch. Even your perfume atomizer
dispenses a variety of useful gases. These items aren’t just
window dressing; to negotiate the game, you’ll have to use
them. The same principle is at work with the game’s weapons.
Though you’ll acquire increasingly powerful weapons as the
game moves along, they’ll not always be the best ones for the
job. Unlike many other FPS’s, in which you blast away with
the most powerful weapon in your arsenal until it runs out of ammo,
in No One Lives Forever you’ll employ your humble pistol with
silencer as much as your 9mm machine gun. And with one slight exception,
there are no uber-weapons in this game. You don't even get a missile
launcher. Again, this makes the "I can shoot my way out of
hell itself" approach much less effective.
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