Throwing in the towel on this one. I love a forgotten gem and No One Lives Forever is peak forgotten gem. 60s spy comedy that's been trapped in some ownership dispute for decades that no one is going to solve. No one's rising up to demand Sony figure out if they own The Operative, and no one's can afford to remake it in a new format.
Which is a shame, because I do think there's a lot of fertile ground here with some modern sensibilities. The jokes about foreign cultures and fat people are nauseatingly late 90s/early 00s and it bogs down the experience. But you can tell that the team's design decisions really excelled once they selected on a female protagonist. Cate Archer is flawed in her angry, reckless methods, but she's also hyper competent and underestimated in this 60s environment. The feminist angle is also a little dated, but it provides actual narrative intrigue that makes you reflect on Cate's motives a lot. She's a Scottish thief with no family trying to prove herself to a bunch of British assholes who are all too hopeful that she'll get killed during a mission and they can write her off. The villains are offering better pay and have women in leadership roles. Still, the end result is massive destruction for personal gain, so Cate's decision to stay on team Britain is intended to show some greater heroism and morality. Its not looking to be a revolutionary take about government and crime, even if it accidentally trips over those ideas. Bad guys are bad dissidents and traitors, good guys are good government workers. Etc.
Ultimately though, the gameplay is the real failure. The game is designed as a shooter first and a stealth game second. The end result is that the stealth kind doesn't... work? Run is the default and even crouching down doesn't do much to save you. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but a required stealth mission becomes one of the most infuriating sections of the game. After taking about a month long break, I reapproached it and found myself running into the exact same problems. The combat's not particularly engaging and it all just kinda bleeds together. I'd love to see this remade with a greater emphasis on stealth options or even making combat more fun. Something to really push this game from an okay to a great.
But sometimes that's just not in the cards. Novel ideas get lost and buried and that's just the way it all crumbles.
Which is a shame, because I do think there's a lot of fertile ground here with some modern sensibilities. The jokes about foreign cultures and fat people are nauseatingly late 90s/early 00s and it bogs down the experience. But you can tell that the team's design decisions really excelled once they selected on a female protagonist. Cate Archer is flawed in her angry, reckless methods, but she's also hyper competent and underestimated in this 60s environment. The feminist angle is also a little dated, but it provides actual narrative intrigue that makes you reflect on Cate's motives a lot. She's a Scottish thief with no family trying to prove herself to a bunch of British assholes who are all too hopeful that she'll get killed during a mission and they can write her off. The villains are offering better pay and have women in leadership roles. Still, the end result is massive destruction for personal gain, so Cate's decision to stay on team Britain is intended to show some greater heroism and morality. Its not looking to be a revolutionary take about government and crime, even if it accidentally trips over those ideas. Bad guys are bad dissidents and traitors, good guys are good government workers. Etc.
Ultimately though, the gameplay is the real failure. The game is designed as a shooter first and a stealth game second. The end result is that the stealth kind doesn't... work? Run is the default and even crouching down doesn't do much to save you. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but a required stealth mission becomes one of the most infuriating sections of the game. After taking about a month long break, I reapproached it and found myself running into the exact same problems. The combat's not particularly engaging and it all just kinda bleeds together. I'd love to see this remade with a greater emphasis on stealth options or even making combat more fun. Something to really push this game from an okay to a great.
But sometimes that's just not in the cards. Novel ideas get lost and buried and that's just the way it all crumbles.
2 Comments
@ZapRoswdower I'll have to give it a go! I'm also just Not Good at shooters, much less PC shooters, but I love the artistic decisions behind this enough that I really want to keep it up
ZapRowsdower
2 years ago