No One Lives Forever: Review + Full Series Retrospective

The Operative: No One Lives Forever (2000), No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way (2002), and Contract J.A.C.K. (2003) are a game series of first-person shooters with stealth and RPG mechanics, in which you play as secret agent Cate Archer in the 1960's trying to stop a criminal organization from taking over the world. Or at least, NOLF 1 and NOLF 2 are; Contract JACK is a standalone spinoff that's loosely connected to the series, in which you play a different protagonist working for the main villain from the NOLF games. No One Lives Forever is a truly unique series due to its emphasis on comedy, with a lighthearted atmosphere that spoofs many of the popular spy movie genre tropes, with lots of varied level designs and exciting, original action setpieces. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Half-Life, Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, and GoldenEye, its combat mechanics and exploration even offer it a bit of an immersive-sim-like experience with you getting to choose how you reach your objectives and what type of gadgets and weaponry you'll use along the way.

Sadly, the rights to the series have been locked in copyright hell for some time now, with developer NightDive Studios attempting to acquire the rights for the sake of doing a remake, but being unable to due to no one knowing for sure who even owns the rights these days, and seemingly none of the people who MIGHT own it caring enough to find out. These forgotten gems have therefore been unavailable to purchase on modern distribution platforms, however, fans have worked to keep the series alive with revival projects meant to make the games playable on modern hardware and operating systems. Even though these games are pretty old at this point and show their age in some notable ways, the things that made them so novel back in the day, like the story, characters, humor, setpieces, and atmosphere, are just as good now as they were then. They hold up extremely well and deserve to be both remembered and celebrated. If you haven't played them before, they're still absolutely worth playing even nowadays, and if you have already played them then it may be worth a replay to remind yourself just how good they are. With any luck, we'll one day see a proper remake or sequel but that's unlikely to happen if we don't keep the memory of these games alive, hence why I've decided to make this lengthy spoiler-free retrospective review.

This review is adapted from my original written review on my blog, which I made back in 2016, however a lot has been added or changed since then. If you'd like to see what I wrote eight years ago, you can consult my original review here:
https://thenocturnalrambler.blogspot....

0:00:00 - Intro + Overview
0:06:24 - The Operative: No One Lives Forever
0:40:50 - No One Lives Forever 1 PS2 Port
0:46:22 - No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in HARM's Way
1:21:24 - Contract JACK
1:28:48 - Conclusion + Outro

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#NoOneLivesForever #NOLF
NOLF NOLF1 NOLF2 Just Another Contract Killer HARM H.A.R.M. J.A.C.K. JACK FPS Stealth Action first person shooter Cate Kate Archer Monolith.