Review

NOLF wins the award for Most Splash Screens In a Game Ever. There are no less than five (5): NOLF, Fox Interactive, Sierra, Monolith, Lithtech. That's five times you have to hit the [ESC] key just to get to the game. I couldn't find any command-line arg to bypass the damn things, either. The whole process left me grumpy, which might help explain why I'm not as enamored with NOLF as the rest of the gaming world.

No, that's a lie. The splash screens had nothing to do with it. It had to do with the fact that NOLF is two-faced. It's schizophrenic. It's a shooter pretending to be a sneaker, which is really a shame because it's a really good shooter. I had more fun shooting people in NOLF than I'd had in a long time. I had less fun trying to be stealthy in NOLF than in any other 'stealthy' game I've played. NOLF's interface just isn't up to the task. It's a pure shooter's interface, crippled primarily by the fact that you can't lean. Quick Design quiz: how do you make avoiding cameras, sneaking up on patrolling guards, and in general being a stealthy international spy frustrating and unfun? Easy - don't give the player the ability to lean/peak around corners. Oh, also don't give them the ability to move the bodies of anyone they've "dispatched".

NOLF really should have been made with the Dark Engine that powered Thief, Thief II, and System Shock 2. It supports the kind of gameplay that I think the Monolith folks were after. The version of Lithtech used for NOLF is a fine engine, make no mistake, it's just that out-of-the-box it doesn't support the kinds of play mechanics to which NOLF seems to be aspiring. But that's just one side of the coin - the stealthy side. The shooty side, or 'combat' if you're going to get all vernacular on me, is the exact opposite. It's a blast! NOLF sports some great gunplay. The weapons are varied, intuitive, fun, and have a great feel. I want to describe them the way one would describe driving a good sports car. They really corner well, and they're fun to drive. Um, whatever that means for guns. The hit detection is good, and the character animations are appropriate and satisfying. That's one of the things you never tell your mom: "Hey, mom, this game has really satisfying death animations. Watch what happens when I shoot this guy in the neck with a speargun!" One quick complaint, though: guns don't retain their ammo selections as you switch between them, which is *VERY* frustrating.

So I wasn't far into NOLF when I recognized this dichotomy of fun combat and unfun stealth. I struggled with it for a while, trying to play NOLF the way it clearly expected me to play it - conservatively, with sneaking and avoidance, and sleeping gas, and noises to distract guards, etc.. and I found myself quickly disengaging from the game. Then it drops me in this mission where I have to fight my way out of a passenger plane at altitude, and engage in a skydiving shoot-out to nab some thug's parachute. Then I'm thinking, "Now that's what I'm talking about!" Shaken, not stirred! But then I immediately had to slog through another stealth mission. The game clearly had me in this vicious tug of war. I was being provided with ample means of inflicting as much damage as I wanted, but then being chided by the mission objectives to be mouse-like. It was like giving a fire cracker to a 12 year old boy and telling them not to use it. Torture!

I was about ready to quit altogether, but instead opted to just "plow through" the game like a well-armed messenger of death, seeking out the fun parts and pulling off wicked Bond stunts whenever the game offered up the opportunity. "I'll just play it the way I want to play it", I thought. Unfortunately, this didn't quite work out, for two reasons. First, there's the dialogue in the game. It's an absolute crime to miss out on the conversations between the bad guys in this game. Honestly, it's like 60% of the entertainment value. The juxtaposition of the domestic, and often cerebral, topics of conversation within the purposefully tongue-in-cheek Evil Organization bent on world domination makes everything sublimely funny. The problem, then, was that I couldn't just steamroll though missions because doing so meant I'd miss out on all of the scripted dialogue. The second reason my plan didn't work so well was that the game ultimately didn't offer up many opportunities to pull off wicked Bond stunts, which is a real shame. All of the ingredients were there, and Monolith didn't mix them up and put them in the oven. On the box, there's this depiction of Cate on a snowmobile, wielding a gun, clearly in a high-speed action fight with "bad guys" on another snowmobile. Forget it. Never happens. There are a few sections where you get to operate a vehicle (snowmobile and motorcycle) but they don't amount to much more than convenient transportation through long areas. Now, it may be that Monolith had grandiose plans for some great vehicle action sequences, and that LithTech just wasn't up to it. Whatever the case, the end result is that the snowmobile/motorcycle just seem gimmicky and the areas where you use them contrived to have long distances that you need to traverse so it's convenient to have a means of transportation. Furthermore, even had I not cared a whit whether or not I heard all the clever dialogue, the game seemed to go out of its way to act as though I was "failing" whenever I decided to just go heels and blast away. Running around a level with a security siren constantly wailing doesn't make one feel like they're doing Her Majesty's service very well.

I ended up toeing the line and playing through the rest of the game in the expected fashion. My lasting impression of NOLF is that of a game that tried hard to join the small club of good stealth games, but just didn't show up with the right tools. The tragedy of it is that given the skills it did have, NOLF could've been a sterling pure action game, with some very unique and memorable set-piece mission designs. In fact, that's the first flavor the game has, when it starts you off in a shooting gallery of sorts, sniping bad guys who are trying to assassinate a U.S. ambassador in Morocco. The mission had a carnival game feel and I was ready to fall in love with NOLF at that point, expecting the game to parade me through a series of what might even be mini-games. Alas, no. The game actually degenerates pretty badly towards the end, with "Such is the Nature of Revenge: Scene 1". Here, Cate has to quickly run around an Alpine town, getting all of the civilians off the streets within a fixed amount of time before a bomb explodes. This is an example of terrible level design. Repeated failure is expected, since the bomb timer is so short. Also, a few of the "boss" fights (yes, there are boss fights) are totally unsatisfying because the game strips you of all but one weapon: the .38 pistol. Apparently, the .38 is Cate's "signature weapon". That may help explain the choice, but it doesn't make it any more fun. Also, there's one encounter where Cate has to literally engage in a fist-fight, and the interface just fails miserably.

So is NOLF fun? As always, that depends on you. I experienced pockets of pure shooter fun, but ultimately NOLF kept making me play a kind of game that it wasn't very good at and was therefore not particularly enjoyable to me. Kudos, though, to Monolith for the writing and satirical humor, and for poking some fun at the whole FPS genre. It's too bad they weren't able to pull off better gameplay as well, for the complete coup d'état.