644 - No One Lives Forever
Best Games - The Operative: No One Lives Forever
Looking, and sounding, like the full color mod-styled version of Emma Peel, Kate Archer is the sort of protagonist that would be surprising and eye catching today. In the year 2000, she absolutely stood alone.
No One Lives Forever, is a great bit of tongue-in-cheek 60s spy fiction in a game genre that desperately needed some levity at that time. The game industry’s tendency to head straight toward grim military shooters was in full effect in the early 2000s, just not at Monolith. Even when they eventually did a military shooter, it was with a character driven horror twist. To this day, No One Lives Forever remains a pretty special game.
Graphically, it holds up very well for a Twenty-Five year old game. The stylization is subtle, but helps the game look better than it’s age. Similar to what a company like Arkane does with their characters, Monolith is creating caricatures that look just real enough that they mesh with their environment.
Gameplay-wise, NOLF is a pretty standard first person shooter. As secret agent Kate Archer you sneak around the lairs of evil masterminds taking out henchmen as you go. Unlike most shooter games, NOLF is riddled with quippy dialogue and knowing asides to the sexist attitudes of 60s spy fiction. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s full of set pieces and dynamic action. Above all, it just feels great to play.
Monolith has appeared on this list of Best Games before, and I think they will likely show up again. They just made games a little different than most other studios. They had a better sense of pacing. They understood when to take control and when to leave it up to the player. NOLF isn’t a bombastic, over the top, experience. It’s subtle and restrained. That’s something extremely surprising from a game released in 2000. Honestly, it might be surprising in a game released today. A game doesn’t have to do everything, or be dozens of hours long. It can just be what it needs to be. Fun.
In a perfect world we would be reading announcements of a new NOLF game in development. Instead, the IP license for the game is stuck in legal quagmire where several companies literally don’t know if they own it or not, and Monolith, the original developer has been shuttered in an objectively stupid move by Warner Bros.
So that means there are shockingly few ways to find and play No One Lives Forever, but if you can, you probably should. It remains one of the Best Games.