After such a well-done single player experience I wasn't expecting much from multiplayer somehow, yet it's surprisingly good fun. It won't steal your time from Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament for long but it could have been hurriedly tacked on; instead Monolith clearly spent a fair amount of time on it. One deathmatch level is a medium sized snowfield with a number of snowmobiles scattered about. You can either try to pick off those riding snowmobiles or simply, quite literally, bump people off in your snowmobile. There is also a gameplay mode called UNITY vs. HARM where you have to photograph enemy intelligence items to win the round. It's like Capture the Flag, except you can zoom in to take a photo from far away, so defending the intelligence item can be quite a challenging matter, especially as some of the levels can be quite large and complex. The netcode does seem like it could do with a little more work, though. While Half-Life and UT are reasonably playable with a ping of 300 (yes, I tested the game with a modem as there's no better acid test for netplay code), No One Lives Forever proved unplayable with such a reasonably high ping. While I could move about the battle field smoothly, enemies would warp about the DM levels, so it's safe to say that if you want to enjoy No One Lives Forever multiplayer, you'll need a fast connection or a LAN. However, having played it on a LAN I can safely say that you will indeed enjoy it.

So are we looking at a near faultless game here? No. Not quite. It did have the odd tendency to bomb out into Windows on me and there were two occasions where I jumped up against a locked door and warped straight through it somehow thanks to a clipping bug. These bugs stole no more than 5 minutes of my playtime though so they're hardly a problem and didn't detract from my enjoyment of the title in the slightest.

No One Lives Forever is one of the most refreshing, varied, entertaining and plain gorgeous FPS titles in years, and is certainly the best story-led FPS since Half Life (before I get flamed here, the superb Deus Ex had a few too many RPG elements to count purely as an FPS, and don't anyone dare tell me Unreal Tournament is story led). You can't help but like the theme, the settings, the characters, the action…. hell, you can't help but like the whole game. And if you don't like it, you're either weird or absurdly picky. If you ever enjoyed an FPS, laughed at an Austin Powers movie or just like games with story and humour, you'll enjoy No One Lives Forever. Immensely.

Pete Closs
Games Editor