No One Lives Forever

Cate Archer is still working for UNITY and trying to thwart H.A.R.M.'s latest plan, Project Omega. While it first seems pretty tame -- setting up a nice vacation spot for Communists -- it soon spills over into something larger with the USSR and the US teetering on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Over the course of forty missions set in more than a dozen locations, you're expected to sort all this out and save the world...again. Along the way you make new friends, meet new enemies and turn old enemies into allies.

The levels are also designed much more openly now, with two or three ways to get in and out of each area. And while you can take advantage of this to get around behind your enemies, they can do the same to you. The game compensates for this by giving you a new set of traps -- banana peels, bear traps -- to lay in places enemies might approach. Cool locator darts can be shot at enemies and let you track them around the levels. Cameras can be circumvented with yet another kind of dart, giving you a little more freedom to get around.

While the levels allow for a fair bit of flexibility, the missions themselves are very tightly centered on the collection of a seemingly endless stream of items. The whole urgency of the game shifts in to low gear once you've spent 20 minutes looking for that last briefcase. Then there are the classic instances where a whole chain of things have to occur in order to trigger a single event. To open a door, you have to restore the power, to restore the power you have to find the generator. Then you discover that the generator's missing a fuse, and etcetera. There's even a fair bit of backtracking in some of the larger levels as you move from one objective to another through areas you've already cleared.

In a year of fantastic shooters, No One Lives Forever 2 stands with the best.