a sequel that puts the original work to shame

Painful, painful, suffering, these are the words we could use to describe our experience with Flashback 2, a game that we finished with enormous complications. Because like all the other Microids games at the end of the year, the title developed by Paul Cuisset comes out shattered, that is to say riddled with bugs and above all with major backup problems. Concerning us, after 5 hours of play, for a reason which remains unknown to this day, our save was deleted. And starting the adventure again with 5 hours of play completely removed was not a pleasure, quite the contrary, because in terms of gameplay, Flashback 2 is arduous. You have undoubtedly seen it if you have followed the news around Flashback 2, but Paul Cuisset and his teams have decided to opt for horizontal scrolling (just to make a reference to the first episode), while providing depth in environments, which will allow Conrad, the hero, to move almost everywhere, in the background or even forwards. The idea of ​​this game design is in fact to bring modernity, while remaining close to the initial “profile view” proposal. Between tradition and modernity, you know. On paper, it's interesting, but obviously the execution must follow for it to work, and that's where we encounter the first problems. Already, because there is a concern for space management, with decorative elements that are difficult to distinguish, mainly due to the angle of view chosen by the camera, which sometimes moves to get into blind spots. Hell. As a result, it will not be rare, for example, to come up against an obstacle without really knowing why, and understand after a few seconds that there is an object blocking the road, or conversely that you have to pass through. above or below an obstacle.

A REAL RETURN TO THE PAST

This wouldn't be so bad if some actions weren't contextual, like jumping. Conrad can walk, run, shoot, roll and even dash (with animation from the caves) as he wants, freely, but jumping, no, it's forbidden. There is no jump button in the game. The only times Conrad can jump are imposed by the game, provided that he is placed in the correct action trigger zone. We then find ourselves looking for areas where Conrad can jump, go down a level or even hang on to ledges, while managing this really poorly constructed depth of space, to which are often added camera movements. incomprehensible. But there is worse than the contextual jump in Flashback 2, there is the gunfight system, again completely out of whack. Basically, since the game plays with depth of field, Paul Cuisset and his teams opted for a steering system via the right analog stick, in order to rotate the character in all possible directions, while the right trigger allows you to pull simultaneously. Controller basically, to shoot, you have to maintain the desired direction of fire and press the trigger, except that it doesn't always work very well, and above all, it's imprecise as possible. As Conrad is hyper sensitive, all you have to do is not point in the right direction of the enemy, who is obviously moving too, and it's a guaranteed side shot. It's quite simply hell and tell yourself that that's during 7/8 of the game to finish the game. The adventure could also end in 5 hours to break everything if the experience was fluid and without technical problems.

GAME DESIGN IN SOCKS

Among the other bad things in the game, there is also the shield that Conrad can trigger by holding L1, but we have not yet understood its full use. Sometimes it kicks in, then disappears and pops up again like magic. Same thing for the armor that Conrad can put on halfway through, we didn't understand how it was managed either. Because even with the shield worn, Conrad loses life points. Bug? Game design in the socks? And we're not even talking about the grenades that Conrad can throw, a system managed with two left hands, the controls are so unintuitive. No really, we border on amateurism at this level of quality. All this heaviness in the gameplay will paralyze the game which also runs in a loop during the first 5 hours of the adventure. We find ourselves going back and forth in “towns” that are literally 30 m2 where we are asked to go talk to people in a room, get a card in the next room or the one downstairs, delivering a package to the next town and seeing how uninteresting it all is. Worse, to move from one city to another, the developers said to themselves that it would be cool to ride a motorcycle, in WipEout mode, but with an obviously cheap finish and completely screwed up driving. Also note that each city is connected to each other via an infinite loop. Basically, if you don't exit on the right to reach this or that town, you can forever drive in a loop and go back endlessly past the town exits.

PS1 LEVEL NPC

As for the graphics, they are absolutely ugly. Regardless of the version the game is running on, the graphics rendering, the textures, the modeling of the characters or NPCs, we are not far approaching the level offered by the PS1, without any attempt to troll, really. Obviously, from afar, the game creates an illusion with these little effects of lights, neon, etc., but when we look at the details, we realize that certain textures are very blurry, that the faces of the NPCs are not even detailed. , that their animations and their behavior date from the last century and that they have an animation loop of 5 seconds, or even 10 if we are nice. It's quite distressing to see such a result, especially on a license which went astray on its own, with the added bonus of its original creator.