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The targeting system works wellWithout imposing any obvious spoilers on your pricked interests - you play the aforementioned Dr John Vattic, who, you learn early on, is a psychic debunker who was brought in to advise a crack military team who are flying to Siberia to investigate a rogue scientist and his crazed psychic experiments.
Not inspirational stuff you might think. But it's in the delivery of the story that Second Sight excels. Two time-threads are incorporated. After initially escaping the confines of the first floor of the Osiris Medical Facility, you go back in time to when you first meet the team you joined to investigate the psychic experiments. You then see the pre-experimentation Vattic.
AdvertisementYou have hair and clothes and an inquisitive mind. The team then put you through the basic military training that medical school didn't provide, which is a clever way of incorporating the normal tutorial into the narrative. You learn the basics of stealth, weapons firing and movement. All this is then put into use when the story shifts forward and you get out of the elevator, bald, bandaged and endowed with those fascinating psychic powers.
As you progress through the game, it seems that the overriding thrust is to return to a healthy looking state. You gain some clothes, your hair starts to grow back and, slowly but surely, your memory is filled by NPC chat; all the while Vattic is in God-mode, manipulating his environment with his mind. It makes for a better X-Files episode.
unfortunately, a good story does not a good game make
But, unfortunately, a good story does not a good game make. And this is where Second Sight falls down. The controls are fiddly at best. For this PC version, released nearly half a year after the console version, it seems the advantages of a mouse/keyboard combo were missed: the cursor travels across the screen at a snails pace, making moving the mouse to target new enemies a real chore. This then forces you to jerk the mouse halfway across your desk - inevitably placing your cursor miles away from your intended target.
Stealth is also frustrating, which isn't aided by a camera that seems to be designed to reveal everything except the exact spot you want. Being a third-person game, the camera often reveals nothing of your surrounding environment when in stealth mode, which persistently involves putting your back against a wall and nothing more.
Hiding from enemies for five minutes isn't my idea of fun. Using the environment to distract guards, in ways Free Radical didn't imagine, is - and an opportunity is lost here. You can use your telekinesis power to throw a bin at a guard and that's as adventurous as it gets until much later in the game. The physics are half the quality of Half-Life 2, the possibilities a far cry from, erm, Far Cry.
In fact, the poor stealth sections threaten to ruin the entire game. Many people will give up before these sections fade out in favour of more action oriented events brought on by a full compliment of psychic powers. The balance is the wrong way round.
Visually, the game is solid, but nothing specialThe graphics are basic for the PC, reminiscent of the cut-scenes found in the TimeSplitters games. This, unfortunately, adds to the feeling that the game has been thrown across the console court without consideration of the PC opponent that awaits it. On the three consoles the aesthetics suits the game perfectly; on PC, post Half-Life 2/ Doom 3, they look two years old.
It's also a fairly easy game. You psychic power bar quickly refills, so there is no problem using your powers to heal whenever you are in trouble. An average gamer will get a weekend worth of bin throwing and guard distracting, max, which, incidentally, feels just about right for a game that gets as close to a 200 page interactive sci-fi/thriller novel as any game I've seen.
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