No One Lives Forever Shaping Up

During our visit to Monolith, we were treated to a demo of the company's upcoming spy shooter, No One Lives Forever. The game is set in the '60s and features stylized characters from that time period. The draw of the game, though, isn't the main character, a feminist superagent, but the action and the level design. No One Lives Forever is an homage to countless spy movies, and it includes a number of missions and action sequences that are ripped off from or inspired by the James Bond and Austin Powers movies.

You'll start out the game having to defend a blind and deaf American statesman in England from the seemingly endless assassination attempts of bungling terrorists. The later levels are more imaginative and interesting. There is a mission that takes place underwater, where you must retrieve secret documents from a sunken ship while fighting off sharks and enemy scuba divers. One mission actually takes place in the sky, as you jump out of a plane without a parachute and have to catch the enemy character while free-falling. Apparently, he took the last parachute from the crashing plane and dove out just before you. There are also missions where you'll ride vehicles, such as a snowmobile and a motorcycle.

The game will let you play as a stealthy character or a gun-blazing maniac. In one mission, for example, you can either sneak into a base, hiding from sentries and picking your way through locks, or simply barge through the front door and fire rockets out of your suitcase-disguised rocket launcher. Your character, Agent Archer, carries a plethora of special items - even more than Bond. This is simply because, as the producer says, she's a woman and has a lot of things in her purse. She'll have exploding lipstick, a hair clip that can be used as either a throat-slashing knife or a lock pick, and a myriad of other equipment. Her arsenal will include a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, a sniper rifle, a crossbow, a speargun, and more.

There are a variety of outrageous characters in the game, including such boss characters as a rotund opera singer, a bald Russian villain, a kilt-wearing Scottish thug, and others. The main character, British secret agent Cate Archer, switches outfits multiple times during the game, going from miniskirts to skin-tight leather suits.

No One Lives Forever uses the Lithtech 2.0 engine, and it looks fairly appealing. Look for No One Lives Forever to ship sometime around October of this year. We'll have a preview of the game in the near future.