The first game was brilliant but I felt they dropped most of what made the game great when they made the sequel. The first game had brilliantly innovate levels which spoofed yet still manage to pay homage to all those great spy movies from the 60s and 70s. Who could forget the fall from the jumbo jet and the fight for a parachute? Or the speargun fights in the sunken tanker? Th gadgets were similarly brilliant. Perfume atomizers full of acid, lipstick hand grenades, hair berets that doubled as lockpicks and daggers. Excellent stuff. Add in some great, lengthy cutscenes and the absolutely hilarious dialogue trees and you had an amazing game. Why they cut all that out of NOLF 2 is beyond me but NOLF 2 was a severe dissapointment. While still a good game in its own right, it was a pale shadow of the first. Why replace all the good goodies with the incredibly boring multi-gun? What happened to all the cool disguised gear?
I agree to an extent. I wasn't severely disappointed. In fact, I thought NOLF 2 was a great game that I enjoyed a lot. But NOLF 1 was a fantastic, stupendous, spectacular game. While it wouldn't really be fair to expect the sequel to every game to be just as good or better than its predecessor, it is fair to expect something at least pretty close. NOLF was in the 9.5+ region for me, while NOLF 2 was more of an 8.2-8.6 (I know my review for NOLF is lower than 9.5, that's because I reviewed it long after it came out and the lower graphics rating affected its score). Certainly nothing to complain about, which is why I still like NOLF 2 a lot, but they're definitely in two different leagues.
I agree especially about the equipment. Something I loved about NOLF that 2 fell short on was the fact that weapons weren't completely isolated to being encountered in one section of the game. Things like the katana and the tulwar, the shurikens, the tommy gun, all of them were mostly only wielded by enemies and able to be picked up by you at certain areas in the game. That, coupled with the much compacted list of weapons and equipment compared to before, did give the game a slightly dumbed down feel to it.
The coolest spy gadget they could come up with was a banana peel?
Hey, come on, now. Don't bash the banana.It kicked ass and gave laughs at the same time. I loved putting God mode, invisibility, and unlimited ammo on with that thing sometimes and just throwing bananas all over the place, and watching the enemies continually fall over like some kind of 50's slapstick comedy scene.
Why cut down on the cut scenes? They were a fraction of the length of those in the original and had hardly any of the humour. And while I'm on the subjet of humour. The innane conversations between the guards in the original was priceless. Why they did away with that in favour of text only memos is also beyond me.
I agree about the cutscenes. While there was nothing actually wrong with the cutscenes in NOLF 2, they weren't as much a part of the game or as interesting as the first game's were. I don't agree about the conversations. I felt that one strong point of NOLF 2 was that it kept the funny conversations, although perhaps their frequency in the game was lessened a bit (just a bit), and it also kept the funny letters and documents from the first as well. To me, that wasn't a weakness of NOLF 2's, it was one of the areas where it came through quite well.
And why get rid of the inventive levels? IN the second game there's a cutscene which shows you sneaking into a secret undergound base in a mini-sub disguised as a shark. That should have been a level by itself rather than just a cutscene. The only level that wasn't just run and gun or stealth and snipe was the fight with the ninja chick in the tornado and it just didn't stand up to the levels of the first game.
I never really thought about the shark submarine like that, but now that you mention it, yeah, I think somewhere in the back of my mind I was wondering why they would go to such a length of creating an innovative spy machine, and not let you do anything more than look at it. Anyway, yeah, NOLF's inventive levels were neat, though they weren't my favorites. This aspect, or rather the lack of it, in NOLF 2 didn't really bother me too much, though I do see what you're saying and agree with it.
The main things about NOLF 2 I didn't like that haven't already been mentioned...
Well, there were the much less powerful weapons. One thing I loved about NOLF was the awesome-sounding and feeling weapons. All of them were pretty solid and made diverse and satisfying bangs when they fired (or coughs, in the case of the Hampton Carbine :P). The NOLF 2 weapons, along with the disappointments I mentioned further on up, were lacking in all areas that the original game's weapons excelled. Many times I found myself hating that damn pistol in NOLF 2, which many times refused to kill in one headshot. God, that pissed me off so many times. In contrast, rarely would a headshot from any weapon fail to kill an enemy NOLF.
Respawning enemies. I just can't believe Monolith did this. I loved being able to kill all enemies in the level in NOLF, especially since doing so without getting caught at all was very difficult in some levels. I'm generally an easy-going gamer, not playing on anything above normal more than one time since I prefer to not deal with the extra frustration of the challenges, but I loved the challenge presented in NOLF of killing everyone without being noticed. It didn't help in NOLF 2 that the enemy would respawn every minute or so, giving you very little time to hide bodies and get away.
Boss battles weren't improved much from the previous game. This isn't a major problem for me. Neither game really needed boss battles to be great. Still, one could always have hoped for them to be a lot better. The first game's boss battles sucked King Kong's balls. In comparison, the second's sucked Mighty Joe Young'sballs. A bit better, but balls are still balls, and games should not suck them.
Loading areas. The first game managed to have the entire level loaded from the start, but the loading areas in NOLF 2 were both fairly frequent and took quite a long time unless you had a really high amount of RAM like 1GB (back then, that was pretty huge), and even then they weren't satisfactory. I know the game was the best looking game out at that point (and continued to be until Far Cry a year and a half later), but I still think they could have done a better job on the loading times.
Enemy alertness to your presense became ridiculous. In NOLF, if a body was found, the enemies would not stop looking for you. Ever. In NOLF 2, they disentegrate the body with NOLF1's body remover (Ahhhh, so that's it! Unity sold all its special equipment on the black market!), which you can't use, and begin to look for you anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute and a half. All you had to do was hide somewhere for a short while until the storm blew over.
The story. In NOLF, the story was the most stupendous thing I'd ever seen. It was thrilling and serious while at the same time remaining humorous and entertaining. It took you through countless different environments, had dozens upon dozens of plot twists. Now, NOLF 2's story wasn't bad. I like it quite a lot. But just as NOLF 2 was a league below NOLF, its story was a league below NOLF's story, as well. It lacked a certain sense of seriousness, taking a slightly sillier approach, and instead of having a brilliantly-woven plot like some top-notch mystery/action novel, it had a more cinematic style, something like you'd see in an averagely good movie.
There are other things, but those are the main ones I wanted to mention. Oh wait, there is one other thing.
Just what in the heck did they do to the HARM guards? Honestly, did they have to make them ALL a bunch of fat, dorky bastards wearing suits out of some kind of colorful toddler's show like Teletubbies or some crap? Oy... When I first saw the HARM guards, and realized that they were HARM guards after that, I was just... o_* Yeah...
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