Second Sight : Games : Web Wombat

A world expert on debunking psychics, he was drafted to a covert military operation. Their objective? Penetrate deep within Siberia to discover the whereabouts of an evil scientist suspected of conducting illegal experiments into paranormal incidents.

Bad move. After six months in a coma, Vattic wakes up in a private medical institution with amnesia and the mysterious ability to manipulate the world by pure force of will.

To add to his misery, a whole lot of people would be unaccountably happy to see him pushing up daisies and so begins a frantic international dash to evade his pursuers and discover the reason for his psychic abilities.

Let's be frank: Second Sight is not the best game ever made.

It has problems. The dialogue is (sometimes unspeakably) corny, the voice-over artists have collective delusions of adequacy, and the AI is a tad on the soggy side. Yes, soggy, for how else could you describe a set of opponents who forget you exist should you happen to stay out of sight for twenty seconds, besides brain-dead?

Yet despite these shortcomings, this latest effort from ex-Rare Software employees Free Radical is a heap of fun. After all, there's nothing quite like battering someone to death with a television set…from the other side of the room.

Viewed almost exclusively from the third-person perspective, Second Sight is played out in two separate time periods (past and present), each with its own challenges and drawbacks, and this should satisfy both the stealth-geeks and the John Rambo-wannabes out there.

Respectively, the present is all about stealth and psychic prowess and where most of the heavy-duty puzzles are to be found. You don't get access to a whole lot of weapons, but can take a fair amount of punishment before giving up the ghost, presumably due to your latent abilities.

Looks just like Half-Life, don't it?

Telekinesis and alcohol don't mix

On the other hand, the flashback sections of the game are pure action-fests as Vattic and his team attempt to gain access to the evil scientist's similarly evil compound, slaughtering hundreds of crazed Russian mercenaries in the process.

Here many and various firearms are supplied, from sniper rifles to American and Soviet machineguns as well as three or four types of pistol but, as a balancing factor, you cannot heal yourself at will nor can you sustain nearly as much damage as present-day Vattic, or V.Diddy as I like to call him.

While initially seeming like nothing more than a contrived plot device, this two-pronged system of play actually provides a good contrast to gameplay and ensures that, just as soon as things start to slow down, a boost is provided to keep things interesting.

Admittedly, it's still contrived, but it works, so who am I to argue?

Guns and Russians aside, it's the good Doctor's psionic capabilities that we crave, and on the menu today are such favourites as telepathic projection, blasts of psychic energy, telekinesis (which later develops into the ability to psi-choke people to death), and 'charm' a.k.a short bursts of invisibility.

An important factor in the use of the above is that you aren't given all these at once. Rather, as you progress you gain access to them, both an inducement to keep playing and a clever way to create puzzles.

It makes sense if you consider that, if the player were just given all these capabilities at once, why, the novelty would wear off. As it stands, every level gifts you with something new and exciting.

On the puzzle side, there are, for instance, some clever uses of the telekinesis power, including speeding up the decontamination of a room by forcing the vent-fans to spin faster and holding a metal panel before you in order to cross the lobby of a building under fire.

By the same token, the puzzles tend to be intensely visual, a claim that can be levelled at the entire game, in fact, which isn't a surprise when you consider the pedigree of Free Radical, with their work on the TimeSplitters series and Goldeneye for the N64.

It's good to see, after the technical travesty of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, a game that uses the PS2 to it's fullest without killing the frame rate at the same time. Everything has a nice anti-aliased look going on (even though if it technically isn't) and the little details really help to immerse one in the game.

Wet concrete shines, muzzle flares are big, chunky and orange, and it's also quite cool that you can interact with computer terminals without switching interfaces. Some of psychic abilities have to be seen to be believed, with extensive use of pixel shaders and high-quality. The 3D modelling is somewhat stylised, but it suits the game well, and it's pretty cool be able to take part in what is most definitely an ocularly interesting universe.

Second Sight's level design is excellent too, ranging from bright, lifeless medical facilities to the harsh Siberian landscape and the inside of a far-flung Russian compound, and props must go to the facial animation on display, testament to and verification of the rumours that 3D modellers do not, in fact, have lives.

Second Sight is not a 'perfect' game, by any stretch of the imagination. Despite that, it does what it is supposed to do with style, class, vim and vigour, and that's more than enough for me.

Game: Second Sight
System: PS2
Players: 1
Online: No
Developer: Free Radical Design
Distributor: Codemasters

Rating: 80%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

Second Sight is on the shelves now.

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