Gameplay

Bond, the game! Now with 25% real fun!

Nightfire tries to be a stealth-action game like No One Lives Forever, but fails miserably in its effort to mimic the formula. Yes, there are lots of weapons, including three kinds of pistols, a submachine gun, two assault rifles, an automatic shotgun, rocket and grenade launchers, and the obligatory sniper rifle. There’s even a minigun and a laser rifle to play with in the later levels. You’ll also be armed with an array of gadgets including a keychain stungun, a laser watch that you’ll be constantly using to burn padlocks off, a tranquilizer dart pen, and sunglasses that have IR, lowlight, and X-ray modes.

Dance!

Laser sight

Oops did I shoot him there?

Q, you’re such a useless bastard

The problem is that the use of gadgets in Nightfire feels clunky, as though it was an afterthought slapped on to fill out a feature list. Unlike No One Lives Forever, where the use of gadgets was thoughtfully integrated into the gameplay, having to whip out a gadget in Nightfire means you’re just being slowed down from advancing the game. Oh wouldn’t you know it, there’s another computer keypad/padlock. I better whip out my decryption PDA/laser wristwatch to get by it. Some of it is even juvenile. When you use the X-Ray sunglasses to look at a man, you see his skeleton. Point them at a woman and you’ll see her dressed in lingerie out of a Fredericks catalog. Touches like these all but scream out, “yes, they really are that useless!”

While the initial promises for Nightfire included multiple ways to get through levels and solve certain problems, the finished product plays a lot differently. About the only evidence of this was in the initial Austria level, where there are a couple of ways to infiltrate the castle. Incidentally, this is the same level they showed off in preview builds that trumpeted this so-called feature. Nightfire plays like it’s on rails, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing (see – Medal of Honor), this isn’t what was promised.

You'll be doing this a lot

Fancy schmancy

Spaceman Spiff!

Stealth? What stealth?

Nightfire’s stealth aspects are overrated and in some cases, broken. You’re supposed to be able to sneak up behind guards, shove a gun in his back and make him surrender. Everytime I tried this, he put his hands up for a second before turning around and shooting me. You can’t pick up and move bodies either, but this doesn’t matter anyway because bodies are not persistent (they melt into the ground, or in some buggy cases, float up and away into outer space) and the AI is too stupid to hear gunshots in many cases, let alone notice a dead body.

Want to strategically tranquilize people and sneak by the rest? Most levels feature 100 or more enemies while you’re only given five tranquilizer darts for your dart pen – and no reloads. Cameras are supposed to be able to spot dead bodies and sound an alarm in response, but since bodies disappear anyway, who cares? Shoot them as the camera pans away and by the time it pans back, the body is gone.

As you might guess, it’s easier to simply run through the game guns blazing and ignore any alarm klaxons you set off. The problem with this tactic is Nightfire’s utterly poor feel. First of all, you’re not even given a numerical rating for your armor or health levels, only a graphical circle of patches that gradually dims as you take damage. Secondly, there is no visual indicator or sense of feel as you’re taking damage. Frequently you’ll get in huge firefights and look down and be surprised to either find that you’re clinging to life by a thread or that you miraculously haven’t taken damage at all. Getting a sense for how much damage you’re doing to an enemy is an exercise in extreme guesswork as well. Since there’s no blood spray, and glitchy tracers and decals, it’s almost impossible to tell if you’re hitting someone or not. Sometimes you can empty a clip into a man at close range and he still doesn’t die. At other times you let out a short burst and they collapse like rag dolls.