Flashback 2 was released on November 16th, while the original Flashback was released thirty years prior. In 2013, a small, not critically acclaimed remake was made that tends to fly under the radar as it wasn’t particularly good. The original game was amazing for the time, and I actually just recently played through it on SegaCD and enjoyed it. Today, I completed Flashback 2, and while I appreciate the idea of a true sequel and nostalgia-inducing tributes to the original, the experience is marred by a flat gameplay experience with numerous technical bugs that are at a minimum noticeable, and at worst game-breaking (requiring a save point reload).
The adventure begins thirty years after the events of the first game. You play Conrad Hart, a member of a futuristic government entity kind of like the FBI. With your AI-infused pistol and agile abilities, you’re a pretty capable dude who quickly finds himself in a heap of trouble. The aliens, known as Morphs both in the original game and the new one, have assimilated themselves into key societal positions of power, and threaten humanity (and ultimately, the universe). Morphs, as you might surmise, assume the appearance, voice, mannerisms, and even memories of the humans they capture and replicate. This makes them difficult to track down and clearly very dangerous.
The adventure begins in New Washington, which was a level in the original game, with Conrad trying to find where his friend Ian has gone. As Conrad, you walk around in a small, nicely designed futuristic city picking up various clues that quickly reveal a bigger plot of deception and danger.
Playing Flashback 2 (FB2) is a lot like the original. Players have a pistol with unlimited ammo, although after twenty shots you do have to stop to reload briefly. Conrad also has a portable bubble shield with a reasonable cooldown timer that gives him protection from the Morphs (I forgot to note their actual name given in-game), which come in a few different forms including human-like soldiers, a few types sentry robots, and even organics in the form of different kinds of bugs. I liked the variety of enemies just as I did in the original game. The gunplay in FB2 is pretty good, although one of the game’s more glaring bugs is aiming issues, at times. I didn’t really have much trouble with the aiming until the last ten or so percent of the game, but suffice it to say it was a nuisance when it occurred. Otherwise, aiming and “bullet” collision detection is pretty accurate and the distance of how far across the screen you can shoot is nice as well.
While fighting off the enemies, who often uncloak or teleport in on you, Conrad can discover medkits and short term (like thirty seconds) weapon upgrades that give his pistol the means to lob short range grenades or to blast a precision, one hit (basically) kill-shot. These weapons are only available at designated spots, obviously placed right before a tougher enemy encounter.
Most of the gameplay involves going from area to area and shooting the bad guys. There is a decent amount of platforming, but not as much as the first game. Jumping up to a ledge is not as location-specific as it was in the original, and the height that Conrad is able to jump up to is pretty amazing at times. Conrad is able to tuck and roll and crouch, as well. This was one of two or three spots where the controls got a little janky. So you can crouch with R3, but to draw your gun you move and hold the right stick. Many times, I find myself crouching down during a gunfight (and thus moving much slower) when I wasn’t intending to do so, but the game (or the controller, I suppose, as this does happen to me on other games sometimes) was picking up a R3 press when I was really just trying to press and hold R to aim. Anyway, taking cover during the action is very rarely required — running about is more common, but the health system and damage you can put out are such that it’s easy enough to basically stand in the heat and survive it every time. There are some parts in the last twenty percent or so of the game that make that tougher, but it’s still easy. Medkit drops are generous, at times I was packing fifteen of these (and they fill your health all the way back up), but by the time the game ended I had just one or two spares. Around the midpoint of the game you also get a cool suit of armor, and recharge stations for it are scattered about fairly. Save points, on the other hand, are sort of weirdly placed; sometimes a bit far apart, and in one instance late in the game there was a save point about ten seconds away from a save point, which just added to the list of unpolished/unfinished things I noticed during my playthrough.
Switching gears, FB2 has an unusual checkpoint/save/continue policy. When you die, which is almost exclusively caused by dying in combat, players can simply press Resume to literally continue right where you were, or sometimes about five seconds later I noticed as the game doesn’t seem to exactly stop or pause when you die. So when you press Resume, it’s like you dropped another quarter into the machine and you pick right up where you left off. Honestly, I didn’t mind this at all — some purists may prefer to face punishment and have to go back to a previous check or save point, but eh, I was happy to just continue where I was as this wasn’t a game I wanted to spend anymore time in than necessary to complete it anyway. Should you desire to load a game instead, you can do this from the pause menu as well. The game makes a new save point for every single save station you come across and use, as well as some on its own terms. This was really handy in going back to unlock the last two Trophies I needed to get Platinum. Indeed, this was by far the easiest game I had ever heard of for getting a Platinum. Just twenty-two Trophies to get, nineteen of which I got just by playing through the game, and two that I got just by spending less than five minutes loading up two save games to do “option 2 of 2” for a given scenario. When I popped those two Trophies, then I got the Platinum, which, I don’t really care about as I’m not a Trophy hunting/100% completionist kind of guy. However, when I saw I needed literally less than five minutes more to 100% this game, it was certainly worth doing. Strangely, doing the “bad ending” path at the end actually had an ending cutscene that displayed video — when I beat the game the first time, and the “right” way, I had audio for the first part of the ending cutscene, but no video (I even reloaded a savegame and did this again and the same bug occurred).
FB2 is rife with bugs, including one or two times that got me stuck to where I had to reload a save point one time to redo a part to get through. There were also times where Conrad literally fell through floors, and another time where I was stuck to the “fourth wall,” i.e. the wall closest to me in relation to Conrad. After running, jumping, rolling, and sliding along this phantom stuck wall, I was able to break free, but it was another in a list of shake-my-head moments in just how incomplete and technically unsound this game is. I think the game was already delayed a year, but it could have used a few more months of polish at least. And that’s to say nothing about how linear and flat the game is — no weapon upgrades, super linear objectives and level design — heck, even the holocubes you find that have text (often too much text) to add more robustness to the story can’t even be re-examined. By this I mean that when you find such a cube, you have literally that one chance to read it because there is no way (short of Youtube, or reloading a save game) to go back and read what it said. A couple of times I picked up a holocube in the heat of battle on accident and I couldn’t stop to read the message as I was taking damage, only to realize there was no way to read it afterwards. So yes, this is another example of the unsound design and execution of the game.
I will say that despite all of its roughness, I largely enjoyed my time with Flashback 2. I’m glad it wasn’t more difficult or longer than it was (took me eleven hours). I thought a lot of the presentation quality was good, some cool looking locations and backgrounds, some good animations, enemy designs that were neat, and I loved the (intentional) ‘glitchy graphics’ effect that happens when you entered into a new room. The voice acting was good, and the comicbook style cutscenes were nicely drawn and colored, too. There wasn’t enough of a soundtrack, though, but most of the audio visual was pretty good here. And while I won’t spoil it for you, I thought the final sequence against Master-Brain and how the devs decided to do it and pay tribute to the original was just really cool.
To sum it up, Flashback 2 was worth a playthrough, and as a fan of the original, I had fun with it. It’s probably the easiest Platinum you can get, too. But the experience is tainted by lots of technical bugs and very linear, flat gameplay design. At its launch price of $40, I’m hesitant to recommend it to anyone that isn’t an ardent Flashback fan who might be more forgiving of the flaws. Whether any more patches get released is anyone’s guess, but even if the technical bugs get ironed out, the gameplay is still thin and pretty lackluster.
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