Second Sight,A 3rd Person shooter with Psycho power.

Second Sight, is a 2004 Third Person shooter made by Free Radical and Published by Codemasters (Yes the same company famous for their racing games) it's important to note that the Publisher of this game on Steam is THQ Nordic, Free Radical made only 5 games, This game, the Time Splitters Trilogy and Raze, As a big Fan of the Time Splitters Trilogy I was very happy to play this game, because I was hoping it to be as good as the TS games, but is this game as good as the TS Trilogy ?

Story​

The game Starts with John Vattic finding himself half naked, in a hospital with amnesia and no idea on what's going on, the level will switch between the events in the present and Flashbacks from the past, and with that said I find that this plot has 0 Originality, outside of the Plot twist, I found it clever however it isn't enough to save the rest of the Plot, the main antagonist are pretty much non-existent for 90% of the game, and the character outside of the Protagonist are likeable but the game doesn't give much reason to be invested into them.

John Vattic himself is just your generic game protagonist, he doesn't have any "salt", I have a very hard time describing him besides that he's your average person.

I do like that during the flashback segment characters will comments on your actions, like if you stay way from your platoon for too long, some thing like (Oh he's finally here, I hope you don't do that again).

Gameplay​

Of course that expecting anything special from this game's story might had been may fault, The Time splitter games didn't have an amazing story either but they had a very good gameplay, but before talking about it let's contextualize the era this game was released in, As I said above it was released in 2004, If you don't remember, while the control scheme of FPS on Console was already figured out by 2004, mostly because of the first Halo, The 3rd Person shooter didn't had it's controled Scheme set, so a lot of 3rd Person shooters from that era had wierd control scheme and Game feel.

Resident Evil 4, the game which standerdasize the 3rd Person Shooter would only come some mounth laters, The reason why I said all of that before talking about the gameplay properly, is that this game biggest flaw is something that I can some what forgive, by the fact that this game came out before RE 4.

So what is this flaw ?

When you aim if there's a target near by the game will auto-focus on them and you will have your crosshair represent as this small blue dot, this doesn't seem to bad when you are shooting against one target, but when you are fighting against mutiple of them, things gets complicated, there's not dedicated buttom to change targe, so you will have to push your crosshair to the edge of the farget in hopes of it being able to move the auto-aim to the target you want, however you can't easy choose which target you want to aim, for example if you want to target an enemy that's between 2 other target each in his left and right , you won't be able to target hin because the auto aim will switch between the left most enemy and the right most enemy, not only that but you can loose sight of your crosshair in the middle of the battle and have no idea where you are even aim at, every weapon has this issue with the exception of the sniper rifle.

In the case of it you will have the view of the scope in the right conner, while the game will still play normally, this is really unconvetional, but I really like how this game does it and I wish more games did it something like this, Playing with the Sniper Rifle in this game is really fun, and works really well with this games controls.

There one feature that saves aim in this game with most weapons that feature being the fact you can change camera angles in the press of a buttom, by Pressing the Shift Key this game will have fixed camera angle like the old Resident Evil games, while this camera angle isn't pratical it's cool that's there, and I like to switch for it whenenver I am in a segment that doesn't have combat.

What's usefull in the other hand is that the game will go in first Person when you press the Control Key, while on it you can't move your character put can aim more freely like a FPS, while on Fitst person I found the aim to be stiff but still miles better than Third person mode for accurate shooting, so for the better part of the game I just switched between 3rd Person for moviment and 1st Person mode for shooting, it reminded me of Resident Evil Dead Aim on the PS2, so take that as you will.

The AI feels very dumb, they just mindless go to your direction and shoot you, not only that but they also miss shoot a lot even if you are just standing still close to them, most enemy die of 2 shoots from most weapons and one headshot, the exception being the Shootgun, which enemies will die in one shoot, but the time that it takes between each time you shoot the weapon and it's reload animation makes it very impratical to use, on Normal dificulty (Which is the difficulty that I played) the game is generally easy for me, I consider myself a pretty mediocre person when it comes to action games, so I imagine that you will have a even easier time than me if you are a good at shooter games.

What makes this game even easeir is that Healing in this game is free and as long as you can stay away from enemies for a short while, to heal in this game you just use your Psycho ability to heal yourself full again, other Psycho abilties have gameplay aplications but I only used them when the Story required.

Shooting aside this game has a lot of Stealth elemets and you can play a lot of this games segments in Stleath, I am horrible at Stealh games, even as far as not playing games like MGS because I don't like Stealth games, however you can ignore that if want, however if you want to engage with stealth , you will find a lot of Psycho abilties that makes thing very easy for you, like the fact that you can go invisable for awhile, been a very overpower ability as you can imagine.

Visual and Music​

Second Sight uses the same engine as the Time Splitters and because of that it looks like a TS, while I do like the Graphics of TS, I don't know if the cartoony characters here, it doesn't fit well with the serious tone the game is trying to have, it feels out of place, nevertheless I like some envireiment on this game even if most of it is just Grays and Browns, the asylums is hilight for me, it has a lot of Grays and Greens but it feels right at home at a place where crazy people are supposed to go and it makes a good use of lighting.

The music is composed by Graeme Norgate, he also composed the music for Golden Eye, Perfect Dark and the Time Splitters Trilogy ammongs other game, and I really like his job here, the music adds a cinematic flare to the game, and it adds to the atmosphere and imersiveness, Great job even if I don't feel like litsen to it outside of the game.

Conclusion​

My expectations for this game were too high, but can you really blame me ?

Free Radical and the people who made this game also made amezing games like Golden Eye and the Perfect Dark Trilogy, I was expecting that their expertise on the FPS genre was able to transfer into the action Stealth Genre, but Sadly I was wrong, Second Sight is a good game, but it's forgattle experience and Flawed gameplay make it hard to recomend nowadays for most people.

 

[throughdarkness]

I was a big fan of Free Radical and grabbed this one back in the day. Unfortunately for it, Psi-Ops came out around the same time and was ridiculously similar in theme. On top of that, it was an unexpectedly stellar game, leaving this one in its long shadow.