The first No One Lives Forever was a bunch of fun -- in fact, I used the 2 demos as a sort of benchmark for machines I was working on and building back then. The full game was a real blast, although I kind of lost a bit of enthusiasm for the game when I hit the first full out stealth mission. But this new game --

The biggest change is in the game engine -- sure, a few of the characters still look a bit odd, Bruno and Volkov in particular. But Cate looks fantastic (the image to the right is what the game renderer produces), and her Ninja rival, Isako, looks wonderful. The biggest improvement I suppose would be in the way the eyes are actually animated instead of merely textured. Of course, most of this is meaningless during actual game play, because you usually don't get a chance to stop and look at anyone long enough to see how well they're rendered. Not all is perfect, there are clipping problems (if you stack up bodies in an out of the way corner, they tend to kind of fall into each other as opposed to stacking on top of each other), and collision errors (during the India scenes NPC's (non player characters) actually 'ghost' through you). The AI is good, guards patrol their areas, but will notice unusual things and investigate (lights on/off when they're not supposed to be, opened doors, footprints, noises), they'll seek cover when they're being shot at, and even sneak around buildings to get you from behind. And they still engage is some of the silliest idle chit chat you'll ever hear in a game anywhere. In an improvement over the original game -- if you set off an alarm, you can hide until the search for you ends, then the alarms get turned off. There's also a new 'skill point' system that allows you to improve your abilities by achieving specific goals during the game.

It's a fun game, it looks good, and is a worthy successor to the original.