Flashback 2 Review (Ronny Ji)
I loved the first Flashback, I liked the Remake but this game is some sort of mistake. It has to be.
First things first.
Gameplay:
It wants to be something but it is nothing. No adventure, no action, no puzzle game. There are nearly no riddles, no jumping or running sequences like in the first game. Okay, it is Flashback 2 and not 1.
But most of the time, you are just fighting one of 5 enemy types. Boring Arcade like you just shoot blind and kill everything with hell of hits. The special ammunition is nearly useless. To difficult to aim, to slow to fire. If an enemy comes near you, you kick instead of shoot him. Does it do anything? No. Just hinders you in shooting. The shield or the armor you find is not necessary.
Aiming in the game is some lucky punch for himself. Because of the 3rd dimension, you can't really aim. It is not precise enough. But some kind of autoassist helps sometimes.
But the 3rd dimension ... the game would be better if it stayed in complete 2D. If you go just left or right, everything is okay. But nearly everytime you walk to the front or the back, you have to struggle with clipping, hanging on objects, getting stuck in and on walls, railings or even on stairs. Not even the enemys are save. They often hang here or there. Their legs are stucked to ... something. It is horrible.
To mention the story. It seems they did not know what they want. They start it, they change it and change it again. They try to make some philosophical makeover and put it down very fast. After that, there is some kind of save the nature but it is cut of as soon as it arrives. Most of the time, you have the feeling there were more than one storywriter and no one knew of each other. Not even in a single chapter, the story seems to have some sort of good structure. Like you take some idea for the story, write it on an napkin, make the game and never wrote more.
The graphics are not noticeable. Mostly just over blooming lights in some kind of cyberpunk scenery. The portraits in conversations could be done by an AI and don't even move or transport some kind of emotion. For this kind of low quality, the game runs highly unstable. I didn't had any crash but the loading times are quite long, people just plop in, random stuttering and often some kind of glitches at the NPC clothes.
The sound is okay, most of it is just stereotype nothing. The synchro in the story scenes is okay, no specials and not the worst. Synchro in the normal game is emotionless. But it appears so random, how should anyone know which emotion it should have.
The one who thought the controls would be good or believes that the only option in this game has to be DLSS on or off button (which is obviously not doing anything in the game), should be giving me money for playing this game.
The controls don't let you finish the game. You just have one button for all the "key items" in game, but why can't I control which one is used? You have to use the correct item at the end and you only can push the down button in hope the correct comes up. Even the hint textbox says you should push the left button but this don't do anything. Even the text box knows how stupid this is but no one listened to it. Most of the walkthroughs or lets plays stop before coming to this section because they can't show the end.
If you have read till this point of the review, thanks. And know that this piece of game is not even worth 5 bucks. It makes me sad because I loved the first game so much. But playing this was a horrible experience. No one ever tested the game before release, even 5 minutes of playing would have made this game a far better one or kept it from releasing. Full price is a pure rip off. Paul Cuisset should be ashamed of this. And whoever thinks this is a good game, never ever played an even okayish game before. Over 6 hours in this and you'll know what it means to waste time.