(Foreword from Author: I would like to point out that this is my 200th. user review.)
The Operative: No One Lives Forever was a game that broke cultural barriers in game designs; it has an attractive and sassy yet strong, intelligent and witty female lead as the protagonist of a game, which itself is thematically a 1960s super-spy-flick that is humourous yet serious at the same time. It was a significant, if rather commercially underwhelming, success.
More importantly, Monolith Productions managed to make a functioning and fun game with an entertaining story out of a premise that could have been so shallow, like games at the time that attempted to use sex symbols to sell.
The Operative had enough of a following to inspire Monolith to create a sequel by improving on the gameplay of the first and cutting out the fat, as well as using the latest iteration of their proprietary LithTech engine to power the game with. The result is a game that is even more entertaining than the first.
A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way is a direct sequel to the first game, taking place some time after the protagonist Cate Archer had proven herself as a highly capable super-spy in the employment of UNITY, the intelligence and counter-espionage agency that she works with.
H.A.R.M., which had been off UNITY's radar for a while, had surfaced again after UNITY had caught wind of its latest plans to plunge the world into chaos and profit from the consequences. As fans of the series would expect, these latest plans can be rather oddball yet dastardly and somewhat believable at the same time, though to describe them would be to invite spoilers.
Cate Archer, who is still sore over H.A.R.M. causing her no small amount of grief in the first game, gets on the case almost immediately and unilaterally, much to the chagrin of her mentor and current leader of UNITY, Bruno Lawrie.
The player takes on the role of Cate Archer, and will be trotting around the globe completing missions and collecting intelligence on H.A.R.M., much like in the first game.
The specifics of how Cate Archer goes about doing this are the parts of the game that will show how No One Lives Forever 2 is better than its predecessor.
As a super-spy, Cate Archer is trained in the use of many firearms and has access to a range of gadgets that help her counter-espionage efforts. She may choose to shoot her way out of situations, or resort to stealth to get past guards and towards objectives. The mechanics that governed these playstyles return, with improvements here and there to make them more viable.
Resorting to gunplay may seem more straightforward and convenient, as in the first game, but Monolith has introduced some mechanics that discourage combat, especially when Cate is not able to take any more punishment.
One of these is that Cate's movement speed will be affected by her level of health; generally, the more injured she is, the slower she becomes. Another is the respawning of enemies through doors that the player may never block. (Usually, these doors lead to some building that can logically be the source of these spawning enemies, such as barracks.)
These designs discourage the player from getting into protracted firefights, though they are fortunately not harsh enough to deter an occasional scrap or two when they are expedient for the situation at hand.
Furthermore, Monolith has included a lot more reasons to stay stealthy instead of shooting everything up.
Firstly, the AI scripts that govern the state of alarm and alertness of enemy guards have been altered such that any goof-ups on the player's part would have their consequences only limited to the immediate area, or a limited segment of the level. For example, if Cate infiltrates a guardhouse that is located in a level and triggers the alarm there, only the guards in the guardhouse and the immediate area will be alerted; those on the other side of the level will still be at default levels of alarm.
The game does not give a clear story-based explanation for this overhaul, so it would seem conveniently contrived. However, it does alleviate one of the issues of the first game, which was that once the alarm was raised, any stealthy approach to the mission was forfeited because all guards in the level would have their state of alarm permanently raised.
Secondly, if the player has Cate hiding away at some place where they cannot find her, the alarm level of enemy guards will eventually diminish. The game makes this design believable by informing the player that H.A.R.M. doesn't exactly do a good job at hiring and training professional henchmen. There may even be some entertainment to be had from repeatedly raising the alarm and waiting for the heat to cool down. In fact, raising the alarm may be advantageous, especially if the guards can be lured onto dangerous things.
There are also no longer any missions that require absolute stealth, which would be a relief to fans of the first game that despised them.
The arcs of vision of enemies have also been corrected such that they are more believable now. In the previous game, enemies can still see Cate if she is hiding behind anything but objects that had been marked by the game code to be walls; the same also extends to bodies that Cate may have stashed away somewhere. In the sequel, Cate can now hide behind or under objects like large tables and vehicles and as long as a majority of her model is obscured from the point of view of enemy characters, she is considered hidden; the same rules for the lines of sight of enemies also extend to bodies.
The hearing of enemies have also been somewhat made more believable, such that faraway enemies are no longer able to hear Cate running from cover to cover and that enemies can no longer hear gunfire from silenced weapons so well, among other improvements that players who prefer stealthy approaches would appreciate.
Certain regions of levels in the game are now designated as "dark" areas, which the player character can hide in to be rendered hidden, as long as there is no light source shining within or into these areas.
The controls remained mostly the same as those in the previous game - they were plenty satisfactory, after all - though there is now the addition of the ability to lean. Of course, leaning isn't anything new in games with first-person perspectives, but it is certainly handy for a game with working stealth mechanics like A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s way.
Perhaps a more immediate improvement over the first game that a player would notice is the graphics. A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way uses a variant of the LithTech 3 engine called LithTech Jupiter, which, for a brief while during this game's time, was technologically state of the art. This meant that the game can render models, environments, contours, textures and lighting that are vastly superior to those in the first game. Cate Archer is a great example to illustrate this with, as she has many models in the game that have believable contours for her stylish clothes, hairstyle and bodily curves.
Furthermore, this version of the LithTech 3 engine scales very well with a lot of computers and offers a stable game session for most computers; the same cannot be said about the LithTech 1.x engine that powered the first game.
Cate is no stranger to combat, and this is reflected in her ability to shoot weapons while moving around with gusto. She also retains her "walking armory" designs from the first game, so while she may start a level with a few weapons, she can collect as many different weapons as she can find in it. While gunplay is not necessary to complete a level with, collecting weapons would help the player appreciate the amount of designing effort that went into the plethora of guns in the game (with the exception of the handgun category; more on this later).
(Some weapons in the previous game do not return in the sequel however, such as the powerful Bakalov Corrector, which was an overpowered handgun with a scope and accurate high-explosive rounds.)
Throughout the single-player campaign, the game will introduce new weapons as is thematically logical, though it also resorts to convenient story elements like the science and technology division of UNITY that supports Cate with new inventions (not unlike how the science division of a certain fictional version of a British intelligence agency supported a fictional male super-spy).
(Weapons introduced the latter way can have a debut that can be rather amusing, if the player spends time to collect the scientists' hilarious research notes; Cate herself will also make witty remarks about them, such as the aesthetic designs of certain gadgets that are disguised in the form of women's cosmetics.)
There appears to be only one handgun in the game, namely the McAllister .32. This is supposed to be Cate's signature side-arm, though considering that it is the only handgun in the game, many other enemies also have it, thus diluting the status of this gun. Nonetheless, this is a small gripe.
Two-handed guns include weapons known to exist during the 1960s, such as the AK-47 assault rifle, a couple of submachineguns, a pump-action shotgun and a bolt-action rifle for sniping work (if scope attachments are available). Then, there are hand grenades, if the player would rather have an explosive solution.
The other weapons and hardware that Cate gets are more outrageous in nature.
However, veterans of shooter games may recognize that two of them are meant to fulfill the roles of weapons that are typically found in shooters. One of them is the Micromissile Launcher, which is an elegant miniaturized weapon that is capable of launching rocket-propelled grenades, thus fulfilling the role of the Rocket Launcher weapon archetype. The other is the Angry Kitty, which acts as a proximity mine (albeit a rather entertaining one).
The rest are wackier and more refreshing. The most prominent of these is the Utility Launcher, which has several ammo types for different purposes. They are unassuming things, but where they are used, they have satisfying and entertaining results.
The Utility Launcher will be the main tool of players who prefer to play the stealthy way through Cate's story and the co-op mode (more on this later). The Camera Disabler turns cameras completely useless at detecting intruders, while the Tranquilizer Dart renders enemies helplessly drowsy, causing them to take a nap on the spot. The Tracking Beacon, which can be placed on enemy guards to track their patrol patterns, would be handy to those who would rather not want to be surprised by guards who are doubling back. Glue Bombs and Electric Charges are handy to slow down pursuing enemies with, or as an opening attack to a gun-fight.
However, ammo for this tool can be rather scarce, as these are after all manufactured only by UNITY. However, the game makes use of the story and its theme of super-spy humour to include stashes of UNITY supplies even in places where the player would not expect them to be at.
The Crossbow is the lethal cousin of the Utility Launcher. The Crossbow fires bolts, which are silent, accurate and often easily retrievable from the corpses of enemies that had been impaled by them. There are several different kinds of bolts: regular bolts, incendiary ones (which are useful for igniting flammable things), poison-tipped bolts (for poisoning enemies that are too tough to be taken down by a single bolt) and explosive ones (when the player absolutely needs to eliminate a target outright, or take out a group of enemies from afar).
There are special grenades that carry and deploy different payloads. There are Acid Gas grenades if the player wishes for a lethal solution that do not make such huge noisy bangs, Stun and Laughing Gas grenades to incapacitate foes without killing them, and Sleeping Gas grenades that are handy for knocking out enemies without having to spend ammunition for other weapons.
Some guns have accessories that can be attached or removed, such as the Gordon Submachinegun having a silencer. Silencers generally exchange damage in return for reduced noise, which can be plenty handy for stealthy solutions. However, scopes do not appear to cause any adverse effect on the use of the weapon when they are attached, so there is no reason not to have scopes attached onto any viable weapon all the time.
The remaining gadgets that Cate can use are more representative of the more playful themes of the No One Lives Forever franchise.
This includes the ever-trusty and very worldly Coin, which Cate can never run out of and can always throw around corners to distract guards with (the more complacent ones may even stoop over to pick them up, rendering them vulnerable to sneak attacks).
Her Keychain bauble contains a somewhat decent light source, though it is not as effective as a torchlight in illuminating dark places. Moreover, there are very few dark places in the sequel, so this is pretty much a novelty item, albeit quite a catchy one.
The Spy Camera, which is miniaturized into a Lipstick (much to Cate's amusement), is typically only ever useful in the single-player campaign, though the player will find that there is plenty of amusing sights that can be captured with it, not least of which are H.A.R.M. blueprints of some silly device (which may be physically encountered in the game).
The code breaker compensates for Cate's lack of training in computer science when there are electronic locks to be broken through. When faced with locks of the more conventional sorts, Cate's Nail Clipper can be deployed into a lockpick, whereas for the more stubborn ones, her Hairspray doubles as a blowtorch (amusingly enough). (It can also be used as a close-combat weapon too, which could be entertaining if not for its impractically low damage.)
Like the Spy Camera, these three devices are only ever useful in the single-player campaign, but the places that they allow Cate to break into often contain lots of goodies and more amusing intel to retrieve, though the game also rewards the player for taking routes that bypass locked doors.
If there is a need to remove bodies as quickly as possible, the Perfume Body Remover returns from the first game, retaining its (disturbing) ability to remove bodies (dead or alive) with its fumes.
Then, there are those weapons that are simply zany, or those that players would not expect Cate to use.
Despite not having any training in the ways of the ninja or shinobi, Cate can toss Shuriken with gusto. She can set up bear traps to ensnare enemies with where the opportunity arises. Finally, Cate can drop bananas for particularly clumsy enemies to trip over.
These hilarious items are mainly included within the context of the single-player campaign, but where they can be used, there is a lot of amusement to be had from watching them succumb to the sillier ones.
Like in the previous game, stashes of supplies are not immediately used up when the player character accesses them - this is a design that Monolith has wisely retained. The player simply takes whatever is needed from a stash to replenish reserves while leaving the rest in the model for the stash.
In the previous No One Lives Forever, the game had a hidden system that governs the skills that Cate has; depending on the player's performance in missions, Cate will be awarded bonus points that contribute towards these skills, such as increasing her health and armor reserves or increasing her running speed, though the player is not able to know how far Cate has developed. Moreover, the player has next to no control over what bonuses would be gained.
The sequel still uses mission performance as the yardstick for the amount of bonuses that would be awarded, so the player is still encouraged to gather as much intelligence as possible and complete as many secondary objectives (if any) as is expedient.
At the end of the mission, the player's performance will be tallied into a score which will also be how many points that the player gets to spend on any aspect of Cate's capabilities.
Cate's capabilities have ranks to denote how proficient she is at them. She starts at Novice ranks, which can be a bit unsettling to fans of the first game as she canonically has had some field experience since the first game. Nevertheless, Novice ranks are still good enough to play through the entire game with, and there is no skill that she cannot perform even if the player chooses not to spend any skill points at all.
As for the skills that she has, these are placed under these categories: Stealth, Stamina, Marksmanship, Carrying, Armor, Weapons, Gadgets and Searching.
It would appear to a veteran game consumer that these skill categories are more at home in an RPG than a game like No One Lives Forever 2. Yet, these categories appropriately comprise and cover what the player will be doing throughout the game. However, it can be noted here that some of these skills could have been combined because they are functionally similar to each other, such as those under the Marksmanship and Weapons categories.
Stealth concerns how quickly Cate can hide herself in dark areas and how quietly she can run. Another benefit of investing in Stealth that is not so well-explained by the game's documentation is her ability to outrun pursuing enemies; this is actually the likelihood of enemies knowing where Cate has gone to if she ran out of their sight.
Stamina governs Cate's resilience; Investments into Stamina grant benefits like increased health reserves, reductions in the effect of low health on her movement speed, her resistance to poison and fire damage, increases in the amount of health that she can recover from using healing items and improvement in her natural ability to shrug off damage.
However, a shrewd player would realize that investing into Armor may be a wiser long-term decision, as the armor that Cate wears, by default, can resist damage better than health, point-for-point. Furthermore, damage that armor incurs does not translate to a hobbling of Cate's movement speed or any other statistic.
While the game uses hit-scan designs for much of the gunfire in the game, it also implements scattering of shots, meaning that whatever that the player is pointing at may not be hit when Cate fires her gun. Therefore, the Marksmanship category of skills is there to be invested in, in order to reduce the scattering. The player may also reduce the amount of wavering that Cate has when she looks down scopes for weapons that have them, and increase the speed at which her aiming recovers after she has performed actions or sustained effects that affect it, such as running or being hit.
Weapons skills govern how much damage the player character can inflict with any weapon and how quickly weapons can be reloaded, if applicable.
Carrying determines the amount of ammunition that the player character may haul around, as well as how quickly bodies can be hauled around. Searching is affiliated with Carrying, as in it determines how quickly bodies can be searched and the variety of items that the player may obtain from them.
Gadgets skills determine how quickly the player character can perform an action with gadgets such as the lockpick and welder. These will probably be most useful for players who want to play absolutely stealthily.
It can be a bit of a disappointment that the player is not given the opportunity to start a new second campaign session with a Cate Archer that already has skill points invested in her after the player has completed the main game mode the first time around. Considering the canon that Cate Archer is no longer a rookie super-spy, Monolith had missed the chance to implement a "new game plus" mode (to borrow an RPG convention). Of course, to give Monolith the benefit of the doubt, such a game mode may dilute the value of the challenge offered by the higher difficulty settings.
In the single-player campaign, Cate will be conducting missions that has her sneaking through exotic (and fictional) locations in Japan, urban areas of developing India, backwaters of the USA and also H.A.R.M.'s secret bases.
These locales benefit from the use of the LithTech Jupiter engine a lot. Quaint lighting gives the levels in Japan a serene feel, scrubby decals and textures makes this game's version of a certain Indian city known for squalor quite believable, and a marine H.A.R.M. base showcases the brilliant (at the time) water surface effects that the engine can render, to state some examples.
The mission objectives that Cate has to achieve may seem rather familiar to players who had played games oriented around covert operations; they range from reconnaissance and infiltration to sabotage. However, Monolith taps into the outrageous themes of the No One Lives Forever franchise to introduce exciting scenarios, such as a certain natural disaster causing the house that Cate and her adversaries are in to be thrown up into the sky, forcing them to fight each other while the tempestuous winds and gravity affect their movement and combat.
Another memorable scenario has Cate restricted to a completely non-lethal approach to the mission, as all of her opponents in that mission qualify as civilians or police; in this mission, she has to use the twists and turns of the streets, as well as bananas, to (literally) give pursuers the slip.
Speaking of twists and turns, many of the game's levels have alternate routes, paths on the side and less-traveled ways that the player can take to hide from enemies, which is an improvement over the first game that certainly helps the stealth gameplay in this sequel.
Putting in more examples into this review would be to include spoilers, so it should suffice to say that A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way have plenty of exciting and outrageous moments to entertain most players with.
Along the way, the player will be fighting a variety of enemies; that the game has the player fighting a certain kind of traditional Oriental assassins early on would be hinting much at this. Of course, most of the time, the player would be fighting H.A.R.M. goons, which have rudimentary AI and attack in a mundane manner that veterans of shooters would be all-too-familiar with, but they are interspersed with more interesting enemies.
There are drones that are hardy but can be taken out with electrical darts, particularly unfortunate (and inept) H.A.R.M. goons that had been subjected to inhumane yet entertainingly wacky disciplinary measures, and the more effective (and superhuman) members of H.A.R.M.
Regardless of their AI scripts, all enemies are subjected to the mechanics that help the player adopt stealthy solutions. All of them have believably limited knowledge of the player character's whereabouts if the player has managed to give them the slip, which is a far cry from many other games at the time where enemies tend to be omniscient vis-a-vis the location of the player character.
Moreover, enemies also have their AI scripts updated with new features not seen in the first game. Enemies now notice a lot of things that are out of the norm, such as doors that are not supposed to be open, footprints in the snow (especially dainty footprints left behind by feminine shoes) and missing sentries that are supposed to be guarding critical locations.
Like in the first game, the sequel has enemies engaging in conversation if they are not in a state of alert, and these conversations can be rather entertaining to listen to.
To state some examples, H.A.R.M. goons often gripe about their work conditions and demanding (and often outrageously cruel) overseers; female ninjas may discuss ways to ensure their husbands' fidelity that are not exactly good for their spouses' health; H.A.R.M. technicians may whine about how mind-boggling and impractical that the zanier of the H.A.R.M. secret projects are.
These conversations make choosing the stealthy solution to missions very rewarding - if the player has no issue with hiding behind cover and listening to the conversations of NPCs for quite a while.
If there is a gripe about the main game mode, it is that the different difficulty settings follow the usual and typical designs in the shooter genre, e.g. enemies become tougher while the player character becomes weaker if the player selects a higher difficulty setting.
The main game mode isn't the only mode to take advantage of the story of A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way. Monolith has introduced a multiplayer co-op mode (that can also be played on one's own lonesome, if the player prefers so) that does not feature Cate, but rather the other lesser-known (and male) agents of UNITY (who don't get canonical names for themselves unfortunately). Up to four players may join together as a team to start a session with.
These agents are assigned to missions that either provide unseen support for Cate Archer or cleaning up after Cate as she goes through the story mode. They do not get the same RPG-like system of skills that Cate gets, but that is because this mode is meant for one-off games and that the scenarios in this mode are barely connected to each other in a logical progression like the missions in the story mode does.
They do however get to have an amount of points that can be invested in most of the same skills that Cate has. Therefore, a player can still make character design decisions that contribute to his/her playstyle.
Their selection of equipment is more restricted: the wackier hardware that Cate can have such as the Angry Kitty and Bananas are not available to them. However, they do get facsimiles of her more utilitarian tools. These will help in the co-op missions, as these have a lot of the obstacles as seen in Cate's progress through the single-player campaign.
The co-op missions do not have all of the entertaining appeals of the main game mode. Guards are usually already on their patrol patterns (especially if the mission involves cleaning up after Cate) and rarely if not never stop to converse. However, there are tidbits in the co-op missions that cannot be found in the main game mode, and they also tie up some loose ends in the progression of the main story. For example, one of the co-op missions involves the rescue of Cate, after a certain event early in the main story had her being rendered helpless.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of this co-op mode is that the host can choose to save a game session so that it can be resumed later. (A dastardly host may also choose to use a saved session that has gone wrong so as to give any unsuspecting players an immediate challenge when it is loaded for playing.)
Overall, the co-op game mode would not be offering the same laughs as the main mode would. However, it does add thematic value to the multiplayer portion of the game; the same can't be said of the previous game, which featured standard-fare multiplayer game modes.
Speaking of standard-fare multiplayer game modes, A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way doesn't have them at all, which is an odd design decision as they would have complemented the co-op mode, despite being standard-fare. Nonetheless, players who are already tired of the usual deathmatches and capture-the-flags would not be missing them much, especially considering that it would be difficult to derive anything that can top the standard-fare multiplayer modes of other games at the time from the themes of the No One Lives Forever franchise.
The previous game had top-notch voice-acting that do justice to the witty writing, but it lacks the facial animations and body language to go with these. The sequel addresses this short-fall by implementing motion-capture and applying it onto the heads of character models. It so happens that the polygons that make up heads can move and warp rather believably too. The same care to animation designs has also been extended to bodily animations, so cutscenes now benefit from characters that will make gestures with not just their limbs but their hips and torsos as well.
It would not be an overstatement to say that A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way featured some of the best computer-generated body language seen in video games at the time.
Outside of cutscenes, there are also motion-captured animations, such as those for walking, leaning on walls and yawning and stretching that give character to the often-bored and complacent guards. During combat, the models of AI-controlled participants shuffle, crouch, roll and flinch in believable, if a bit comical, manners, which reinforce the playful themes of the franchise.
(The models for player characters do not get the same repertoire of moves, unfortunately, though this may be understandable as they are subjected to movement controls that have to be suited to whatever control method that the human player is using.)
As for the voice-acting itself, many of the voice talents in the previous game return in the sequel to voice characters that would be memorable to those who had played the first game, such as the affable Bruno Lawrie, the spitefully witty Dmitrij Volkov, ever-defiant Magnus Armstrong and of course, the sassy Cate Archer herself.
In the previous game, the goons and henchmen that the player has to face have little variation in their models. That is (somewhat) no longer the case in the sequel, as the game randomly generates their head polygons from a library of preset parts for faces and hair. Unfortunately, their voice acting is not as varied, but at least every type of enemy that the player will face has unique voice-acting, such as the amusingly foppish French accents of criminally-inclined practitioners of a certain silent art form of bodily motions.
As A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way ultimately still uses settings inspired by the real world, most of the sound effects in the game would seem worldly to the player. Gunfire in particular would sound quite familiar to most players, as do the noises for the usual reloading of guns.
However, the more subtle of the sound effects in this game would be the ones that would seem more refreshing to a jaded player. Footsteps of different characters sound different indeed, with Cate's dainty clip-clop of heels being the highlight in this game. Ambient sounds help accentuate the locales that the player character would go to, such as the rustle of snow and the howl of winds in a level set in Antarctica.
The soundtracks consists of 1960s pop tracks, joined by some orchestral music. This combination may seem unseemly, maybe even unlikeable, but they surprisingly fit quite well, likely due to the fact that most of the orchestral tracks take the same notes as the pop ones. Nevertheless, many of them fit the occasions that they are played for.
The tracks that are of higher noteworthiness are those that are associated with the stealth gameplay. As long as the player hasn't resorted to gunplay yet and is escaping from enemies, the music will take on a playful jingle, which enhances the thrill of giving enemies the slip.
As much improved as this game is over its predecessor, A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way is not a perfect game. While its aesthetics, writing and gameplay are very well done, it suffers a few technical issues that occasionally mar these three otherwise very strong aspects of the game.
The LithTech Jupiter engine may be the culmination of Monolith's engine development experience at the time, but it still had some bugs associated with it, such as textures sometimes failing to be called, leaving walls completely black or models looking rather muddy.
Occasional sound problems occur, e.g. voice-over clips did not play, they cut off prematurely.
A peculiar set of programming for bodies of enemies has them retaining physical collision properties against gunfire when they have yet to be rummaged through for items. This may cause some issues if corpses are propped up against walls for whatever reason (such as being impaled onto walls by crossbow bolts) and are blocking gunfire.
Dying characters have death animations but the game turns their corpses into ragdolls shortly thereafter. Depending on level geometry and the way that the player resolved combat with, their ragdolls may be left in awkward positions that detract from any good impression that the player may have about the animations after watching how well-animated models generally are.
There are other bugs, but the above-mentioned ones are the most common. Patches have been made to address many of them though, and some machines may not even encounter any at all.
In conclusion, A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way builds on the successes of the first game in virtually all aspects. If there ever was a game that got 1960s super-spy themes right in plenty of ways, this is it.