Your favorite super spy, Cate Archer, is back for more action and humorous villains.
In this sequel Cate must deal with new enemies from the H.A.R.M. organization, as well as threats from the Russians to start a nuclear war. This was a great sequel, with new features and crazy new enemies.
Gameplay This game, like it's predecessor, was a lot of fun to play. There are some new features in this sequel. The one that stands out the most, is the new skill system. Each time you find a piece of intelligence, or complete an objective, you get experience points. This is new as well, because if you remember from the first game, you just collected the intelligence items during the missions, and were given a summary of how many you got at the end of the level. Now you can accumulate experience points, and whenever you want, you can use those points to advance to the next level in the skill system. There is a drop-down menu labeled "Player" at the top of the screen when you hit ESC key. This menu shows you what skills you can advance in, and they include highly valuable skills such as Weapons, Health, and Stealth. There are 5 different levels of advancement that Cate can reach during the game, and of course each one requires more experience points to obtain. Some of these skills really help. For instance, the Health skill will make Cate's health meter larger, so that she can use more med packs, and take more damage.
This was a very large game as well, with 15 missions. Granted, some were just movie cut-scenes, but for the most part, they were full-blown levels with plenty to do. Of course you cannot have a NOLF game without any cool weapons and gadgets. I am happy to say that this sequel did not disappoint in that regard.
One of the better new weapons in my opinion was the utility gun. This thing could be equipped with tranquilizers, tracking darts, or camera disablers. The latter was really nice, because if you remember from the first game, you had to sometimes reach or jump to get the old camera disablers installed. With this new gun, all you had to do was aim at the camera, and fire. This was much easier.
Some of the great new gadgets included bear traps, acid bombs, and one of my favorites, the angry kitty. This was a robotic cat, which would lure the bad guys, and then explode in their face.
It was also nice to see that the use of vehicles was carried over to this sequel. Once again, you get to use a snowmobile through a few missions. There is also a part where Magnus Armstrong (remember him), is driving a tricycle while Cate is riding on the back and shooting at enemies. That was different.
There were two new modes introduced in this game that I would like to mention. One was the new search mode. This was very nice. Cate can now search file cabinets, desks, bodies, and piles of paper in order to obtain intelligence items. As I mentioned before, the more of these you gather, the more experience points you gain. Whenever you came across something that could be searched, there was a status bar that appeared on the screen, and it determined how long it would take Cate too search a particular item. Buying more levels in the Search skill could reduce this search time.
The other mode was also very nice. This one deals with Stealth. There were areas that Cate could go to, that would allow her to be totally hidden from her foes. Once again, you could tell she was in one of these areas by a status bar that would show up on the screen. As with search, Cate could lower the time it took to hide by buying levels in the Stealth skill.
Graphics and Sound
It looked like they had improved the graphics in this sequel, and that was nice. There were also some interesting locations that Cate visited in this game. One that comes too mind is a boss battle in the middle of a tornado. Yes, you heard me right, Cate has to fight a boss enemy in a house that is falling apart and caught in the middle of a tornado. That's just crazy.
The sound remained excellent in this game. Once again, the music was very 60's oriented, but still good. Plenty of weapon sounds, and ambient noises.
Learning Curve
This area was not quite as thorough as it was in the first game. Cate did not visit Santa's Workshop at all in this sequel. The way the in-game help was handled instead was really quite amusing. Santa now takes the form of a talking parrot. Yes, that's right, you get instructions on how to operate certain things from a bird. That's some funny stuff right there. There will also be your occasional note tacked onto a door or post, which describes the operations of things. It does help to have played the first game, but it is not entirely necessary.
Replay Value
There are a few incentives to play this game again. I personally would, just because I like this game series so well, but I understand that some players need more. There is a difficulty setting, and I am sure that the higher settings would make a more challenging game. There are some crazy enemies that Cate must deal with in this game. They include Ninjas, French Mimes, and Super Soldiers. I would also be inclined to play this game again in order to see if I could get a higher ranking in the skill system. As I said before, there were 5 different levels, and when I finished the game, I had only reached the 4th one in a few skills. For you on-line enthusiasts, there is a multiplayer option, and it looks like it could provide hours of enjoyment.
There was really only one flaw that I noticed in this game. That was the load times. Loading a saved game took quite awhile. I am not sure why this happened, because saving a game was relatively fast. So I was confused as too why it would save quickly, but load slowly. If anybody has any theories on this, please feel free to post them.
As you can imagine, I would most definitely recommend this game. It is enjoyable, funny, and all around a good time to be had.
