Reviewed: January 20, 2004
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
Sierra Entertainment
Vivendi Universal
Developer
Monolith Productions
Released: November 11, 2003
Genre: FPS
Players: 16
ESRB: Teen
6
7
7
5
6.2
System Requirements
Recommended System
No one can argue that there is an abundance of FPS games available for the PC, making it all that much harder to sort out the good ones from the bad. Contract J.A.C.K. tries to slip past the scrutiny of the discerning gamer by associating itself with the much-heralded No One Lives Forever series of games. Billed as the “Official Prequel to No One Lives Forever 2”, this game is as much a “prequel” as if George Lucas had re-released American Graffiti and called it the “Official Prequel to Star Wars”.
In all fairness, J.A.C.K. (Just Another Contract Killer) does borrow many things from the NOLF series including a few villains, organizations, the menus, HUD and worst of all the music. Rather than trying to carve a new niche for a potentially new and exciting character, Sierra has merely produced a knockoff title to sap $30 from the unsuspecting gamer.
For this relatively short ride you’ll trade in your sexy female spy personae for a macho contract killer, John Jack, who shoots first and doesn’t even bother to ask questions. This time you are working for H.A.R.M., the notoriously evil organization that Cate has been fighting in the previous games. The timeline for this story puts Jack in events that come after the first NOLF and before the sequel and fills in a few (very few) story elements that might be of interest to diehard NOLF enthusiasts.
The game starts with Jack tied to a chair waiting to eat a bullet. He miraculously breaks free and kills his captors then heads off to his H.A.R.M. job interview where he kills most of the henchmen currently on their payroll. Guess they never heard of paintball or laser tag.
Everything you loved about the gameplay in the original NOLF and NOLF2 games is gone. Contract J.A.C.K. has eliminated the exploration and stealth aspects of the series and reduced the gameplay down to a pure shooter along the lines of Serious Sam. You’ll fight seemingly endless waves of henchmen through some attractive but quite linear levels collecting weapons, health, and body armor along the way.
Much to my disappointment all of the drawers, file cabinets, and other items Cate was allowed to open are present in these levels but are merely for show. Jack doesn’t care about securing documents or reading humorous letters and memos. He is here to kill and so are you. Also gone are the wonderful spy gadgets that opened up the gameplay in the NOLF games. You’ll rarely get to even pick-up a non-weapon item. Over the course of the game I was able to get C4, a launch keycard, a bucket, batteries, and an O2 cylinder. These items are used within minutes of collecting them, so there is never any doubt when or where to use them. They aren’t even stored in your inventory; they just pop up on your HUD as an icon.
For a hired hit man, Jack isn’t very subtle. Unlike Agent 47 (star of Hit Man), he blasts his way through level after level. Stealth isn’t even an option since you are immediately “noticed” and accurate “targeted” the moment you step over some arbitrary event trigger line. The only thing remotely stealthy is the ability to eavesdrop on guards through “closed” doors. Some of these conversations are truly hilarious.
Guard (with thick Czech accent): Tell me what I want to know.
Captive: I'll never talk.
Guard: Is that a fact?
Captive: Well, no. It's more of a guiding principle. I suppose if enough torture were applied...
That’s just one example. There is another conversation dealing with invading Italians, their motives, and politics and some hilarious radio chatter where the boss orders his men out to fight while he goes to the bathroom. There are also some humorous posters scattered about the levels including my favorite, the “Hamster of Fury” movie poster proclaiming “Much Big Scary Action”. But even with these nuggets of humor interspersed throughout the game it isn’t enough to make up for the formulaic “shoot everything that moves” gameplay model.
You are never really caught up in the story. We know little of Jack and nothing pertinent is ever revealed about his past, so we simply don’t care about him anymore than we did the “Doom Marine”. He doesn’t even have any cool quips to fire off when he dispatches the enemy.
The game is heavily balanced in favor of the AI, even on the normal skill level. Each soldier will take a dozen bullets before going down, which does offer a nice bloody mess on the floors and walls, but unless you are a master of the headshot you will likely run out of ammo. Since enemies come at you in waves you are unable to take cover. Instead, you are forced into the open to relieve the fallen soldiers of their ammo. There were several times where I was reduced to my fists and had to eat plenty of lead as I pummeled a guard for his machine gun.
There is a decent selection of weapons including a futuristic laser rifle ripped right from the set of Moonraker. Unfortunately, all of these weapons share the same level of ineffectiveness with the exception of the sniper rifle. And even though your sniper rifle has a nice animated zoom you have no “levels” of zoom – you are either zoomed in or out.
AI cheats; both in the fact that everyone is a perfect marksman and that they have instant knowledge of your presence and exact location when you trigger the swarm. Snipers will hit you when you lean out from around the corner, even for just a second and if you try to take cover they start throwing grenades to flush you out.
As impressive as NOLF2 was (and still is), Contract J.A.C.K. takes a step back in quality; quite a shame considering it is using the same Jupiter engine. The levels are uninspired for the most part and are quite linear by design. You are guided through most of them through triggered events that will collapse passages or countless locked doors will keep you on the designers’ chosen path. There is a mix of indoor and outdoor levels, but the outdoor levels are extremely primitive with the exception of a unique space walk/combat mission. Even your trip to a space station isn’t as impressive as the same style mission when Cate went into orbit.
All of the enemy share the same modest selection of models whether you are fighting Czech guards, Italian commands, Special Forces units in skin-tight rubber, or even the guards in spacesuits on the moon. Despite the small selection the guards are animated nicely and dive, roll, and take cover. It’s all predictable and obviously scripted behavior.
The movies, which were a huge part of the original NOLF games, are now much fewer but use the same game engine to offer seamless story with the action. The faces and up-close character models are certainly better than anything in the regular gameplay.
I have to take off a lot of points for a game that reuses huge portions of another game’s soundtrack, especially when those songs have no place in the game. When I’m blasting my way through a military base trying to steal an experimental snowmobile I don’t want to be listening to the plucking banjo and “Olive Garden” Italian themes from Cate’s adventures. I can’t recall a single piece of original music in the entire game. I’m not saying there isn’t some but I’d swear I heard it all before in the previous NOLF games.
Sound effects are limited to some environmental noises and plenty of gunfire and explosions. It all sounds and works well even though it doesn’t rise above anything else we’ve heard before with the exception of the laser rifle. This is perhaps the “best sounding laser weapon” in any game to date. I had my suspicions on where I had heard that sound before and sure enough, this is the exact same sound effect used in the James Bond Moonraker movie. This weapon sounds fantastic, both in the space station and in the huge battle segment in space – also lifted from Moonraker.
The NOLF franchise has always been known for quality dialogue, both in the movies and the humorous conversations you can encounter throughout the game. While the movies have been trimmed back to the point of almost being non-existent, the humorous exchanges between guards and some even funnier radio and PA chatter are back and better than ever. I only wish there had been more.
The game does support EAX 2.0 offering up a nice 3D sound quality that does a good job of immersing you in the action but it never really enhanced the actual gameplay. You’ll be locating your targets by the impact of incoming bullets rather than their sound.
Contract J.A.C.K. is short. With two dozen missions of varying length spread across less than half that many chapters, you can finish this game in about 6-8 hours provided you quicksave often so you don’t have to replay after cheap ambushes.
There is a decent multiplayer component that is limited by your bandwidth to the Internet. Most non-LAN users can enjoy 8-player games while T1 and networked gamers can have up to 16 players. The multiplayer modes are nothing new and only add minimal extra gameplay to the title. The game does come with level-building tools so those of you with a creative streak can start making your own mods.
I really wanted to like Contract J.A.C.K., but when it was all over I couldn’t help but feel I had played a very nicely crafted “mod” built with the very tools Monolith included with the game. There is very little story present and no emotional attachment to the lead character. All of the “fun” aspects of the NOLF legacy are gone, even that hippie 70’s flair, and this is really nothing more than a generic shooter trying to cash in on an existing license.
With that in mind, it’s a fun little romp, better classified as an expansion mod that is worth $20 and nothing more. There’s not enough NOLF-related material here to attract fans of Cate’s games and not enough original gameplay to attract anyone but those looking for a non-stop, non-thinking shooter.