"Flashback 2" is a game I used to dream about. I don't know if I can eloquently express just how cool the original game seemed to me as a child. It was unusual to find a game where you played as a character with realistic human proportions, for a start, but it was the wild diversity of its locations, and the satisfying consistency of its controls that really captivated me. The weird, lush alien jungle you wake up in leads you to a weird, concrete underground that reminded me of the alleyways and backrooms I wasn't allowed to go in. Flashback was dangerous and sort of illicit. It was satirical about adult subjects like part-time jobs, public transport and bureaucracy. It was a million miles from any other Mega Drive game. At that time, no game seemed better lined-up to deliver all the rich potential of the future than "Flashback 2".

I don't really want to bully this game too much. I love Flashback, and I didn't buy this to fuel an online rant. I'm an earnest fan, and while I saw many red flags on my approach, I was curious about the game that Paul Cuisset decided was worthy of branding as its first numbered sequel. I recently viewed a behind the scenes video on YouTube that had been uploaded around a week prior. I was the twentieth viewer. I'm well aware that the braver members of the development team may be trawling the internet for player reactions, and by posting a review, there's a fair chance they'll read it. I don't want to ruin their week, and given this, I'll pepper this review with a couple of pieces of faint praise.

1- Flashback 2 isn't as bad as I'd anticipated
2 (even fainter)- Flashback 2 is the best continuation of Flashback I've played (including that truly abysmal Flashback Legend GBA prototype)

For all the talk of unacceptable performance issues and idiotic design, I don't think the game is that bad. On calm waters, I felt the game was acceptable. It's a first-time project from Microids' new in-house development studio, and given the state of independent multiplatform development in continental Europe these days, I think the game they delivered makes sense. Ubisoft's acquisitions ravaged France, Belgium and much of Northern Europe's games industry with relentless studio buyouts, and I'm thankful Cuisset retained the rights to his greatest achievement after working with the publisher on that atrocious "remake" ten years ago. All the attention surrounding the game's release has been put on IGN's 2/10 review, but if this had been released as a 3DS eShop game without a familiar title behind it, I fully expect some outlets would have risen to a 5 or even 6.

Right. Hopefully that's cushioned the blow.

With the couple of software updates the game has received since launch, Flashback 2's biggest problem isn't its performance. It's just that it's really fucking boring. Conrad Hart wakes up after sending himself to cryosleep, drifting off to the boundless unknown at the end of the first game, and wakes up a few moments later having to revisit all the same locations and do a bunch of the same shit. New Washington, the jungle, Planet Morph, IAN. They're all back, expecting you to have remembered them from 30 years ago. Only a few things actually resemble the original game. Mainly the elevators. The original game's art hasn't been referenced for much beyond the colour of Conrad's jacket. Typically, if anything in Flashback 2 reminds you of the first game, it's coincidental.

The game uses a Kirby and the Forgotten Land-style diorama view, with Conrad appearing small and distant in these elaborate sci-fi environments. Conrad isn't a big pink ball, though, and it's often quite a challenge to see where this drab little man is on the screen. The camera often obscures ledges and jumping points, and you need to line yourself up with each one perfectly to be able to use them. So much of the game is spent wobbling into the intended position to progress. I'm still trucking on with my 2009 Sony Bravia, but the combination of Flashback 2's obtuse camera and Black Friday sales was the closest I've come to buying a bigger TV in 14 years.

Despite the precedent for falls killing you in Flashback, this sequel loves a sheer drop. You take zero damage from them now. It just makes designing environments easier when you don't have to line up different floors properly. To Flashback 2's great benefit, if an obligation is ever at risk of making the game truly insufferable, they just don't bother putting it in. The unbalanced gunfights, the disjointed level design, the wonky puzzles. Don't worry, the game's not asking you to commit to any of it. They essentially give you a "skip content" button whenever things are getting too rough. If you continue after dying, there's no punishment. All your progress carries over to your new spawn. Trivialising every action sequence is a good way to prevent players from feeling frustrated, though it jeopardises any sense of tension or excitement the designers may have once hoped for.

Different levels take distinct approaches to gameplay. Sometimes subtly so. One may play more like an RPG, or a standard twin-stick shooter, or even a Metroidvania. Typically, the less demanding a style is on the surrounding game design, the less of a pain in the arse it is to play. There's a wee hacking mini-game in here. It's something you could run on a solar-powered calculator, and it's far and away the most solid part of the whole package. There is a sense that this team could make games, but expecting them to make a PS5 release is like asking your cat to paint your house.

A fundamental problem with the game's structure is they've jumped to the conclusion that "action" equals "fun", without making combat in any way exciting or challenging. These parts are supposed to be the fun bits, to reward you for pushing through the tedious bits, but there's no distinction between the two. The game constantly throws medikits at you, and no matter how many hits I took from complete lack of care, I never ended up with less than 10 in my inventory at any time. Gun play operates like a twin-stick shooter, and it just makes no sense with Flashback 2's floating - sometimes side-on, sometimes isometric - camera. The automatic lock-on function does all the work, lining up shots and playing the game for you. Geometry does nothing to spice up these sequences either, with bullets flying through cover and Conrad having little meaningful relationship with his environment. Thanks for making this game, guys.

I wouldn't call Paul Cuisset a household name. He hasn't had the best career. Shockingly, he does not seem ashamed of it. I'm used to cute wee nods for the fans in games from Kojima, Suda or Suzuki. I almost leapt out of my seat when I saw this prick reference the PS3 survival horror shitshow, Amy, in Flashback 2. What's he doing? The old man has left the house with his trousers down. Please arrest him for his own safety.

If you're a true Flashback nut (i.e. me and the other nineteen guys who watched that YouTube video), you may have some knowledge of a "Flashback 2" that was briefly worked on for the Mega CD. Not much is known about the project, and most of its story would be reworked for Fade to Black, but one thing they were most keen to implement was a mech suit for Conrad. In this radically different version of Flashback 2, they have been keen to implement the feature. Weirdly, and amusingly so. Multiple characters will surprise you with their familiarity with Japanimation robots. From a Marlon Brando pastiche mobster to a mutated village oracle figure, there's a wide range of personality types who will act against type to discuss just how intimately familiar they are with mechs. The mech stuff amounts to an atrocious minigame you play once, and another section later on, where you walk in a straight line. I think the 1993 Flashback 2 "mechs" more resemble this game's power armour - a feature that the game barely introduces, and rather, just dumps in without much explanation. You press triangle, and Conrad goes into morphin' time, adopting a full body metallic suit. It prevents him from taking damage from radiation. Like most of the game, it's completely lacking in substance, but it's cute to think that maybe Cuisset was thinking of the first time he attempted to make this game at some point during production.

I'm a fan of early 3D games from small, inexperienced developers. I can enjoy a 10fps Game Boy Color conversion of a PC FPS. I have completed Deadly Premonition. It's fair to say I have a high tolerance for poor performance in games. That said, Flashback 2 pushes at the furthest reaches of my empathy. Environments are often very large, and you may spend over an hour in some of them. Interact with them too much, by destroying breakables, attacking enemies, or opening pathways, and the software will dedicate more processing power to remembering that interaction, dropping the framerate. Even menus seem affected by the increased burden, taking multiple seconds to scroll through options. In one Metroidvania-like section, I was completely stumped for well over an hour, retreading the same ground over and over. By the end, the game looked like I was attempting to run Half-Life 2 on Windows 95. Leaving the area and coming back doesn't reset the environment to default. The game does not forget. It does not forgive. It encumbers itself with remembering each little interaction you ever deigned to commit to it in your flailing cluelessness, warping and sweating for your sin. Somehow, I eventually fiddled with the Analyser's frequencies enough in enough rooms to find my way out of this rapidly-degrading purgatory, but it's not an experience I will forget anytime soon.

There's also a lot of weird presentational setbacks. The bold utilitarian typeface, clashing hard against the overdesigned neon, semi-transluscent HUD elements. The menus that feature synonymous terms for different options. The dialogue trees that display the wrong characters' portraits, and once, a blank white square. Character artwork and in-game models bear little resemblance to each other, too. One fairly significant character appears with blonde hair in portraits and cutscene artwork, but with pink hair on their in-game character model, and I highly doubt it's intended as an homage to A Link to the Past. I've seen people accuse the game of using AI-generated artwork. I will not libel myself by commenting on that. Environments frequently look surprisingly complex, attractive, and intricately detailed, though some of the most interesting-looking locations are blocked off by invisible walls, and only serve as elaborate backgrounds. There's also the script and the apparent lack of any voice direction. I suspect it wasn't written by native English speakers, but French programmers who were confident enough in their fluency to avoid hiring any English localisation staff. There's a lot of awkward terminology, weird, bad jokes, and conversations with no sense of natural flow. Conrad doesn't feel anything like any previous version of the character (which thankfully means he's not like the Ubisoft remake Conrad, either), mainly coming across like a college student who wants to be cool and funny, but has no idea how to tell a joke. Locations, technology and character names get pronounced differently by each member of the cast, and one of them even struggles with the name "Ian". Maybe the most nostalgic part of the package is that it feels like years since I've played a game that had a script this bad.

I almost respected the story. It looked like it was headed towards some amusingly pulpy territory that surprised me with a sort-of clever twist. I thought they were using some very silly logic to make both Flashback 2 and Fade to Black simultaneously canon sequels to the original game. They don't, though. They use modern "multiverse" shite to tell a story that's both completely incoherent and inconsequential. There's two Conrads, and a supporting character that's named suspiciously closely to one from Fade to Black, but I don't think the team ever thought about the story half as hard as I did. There's some interesting stuff regarding a subclass of mutants on Titan, and what that suggests about the enemies at the start of the first game, but I'm not sure they even had those guys in mind. It's mainly just a hodgepodge of worn-out tropes, and very little of it gels together in any meaningful way. There's a Deku Tree, and AVALANCHE, and a bit where you have to tell which of the two presidents is the real one before killing the imposter. It's nonsense. Don't make the mistake I did by thinking it might be worth paying attention to.

Despite the myriad of problems I have with the game, I do have a little respect for it. On some level, as a boring game for the world's biggest nerds, Flashback 2 almost works. Through all the ideas that don't quite come together, you can see the things that were once attempted with it. The ambition it once had, that was later sacrificed as they had to be realistic about what the team's capabilities. I'm not going to pretend that it represents the fulfilment of a creator's long-discarded personal dream in the way a Shenmue III does, but it's a much more curious prospect than something as homogenous as a typical PS5 action game. The twin-stick, Metroidvania, lite RPG, wannabe cinematic epic. I don't know. I haven't played many games like that, and if I really squint, I can almost see the game they once wanted to make. If the team had a Satoru Iwata-level talent on board, they might have been able to refocus the project to deliver something worthwhile. There is not a single person on the planet who I'd recommend play the game, but if I was to hear a Real Flashback Guy ranting against it, I might ask them to calm down a bit.

When I completed the game, the ending cutscene failed to play. Goodbye, Flashback 2.

Tried this on Steam out of morbid curiosity as someone who grew up with the original. It's pretty terrible.

Clunky combat, generic gameplay, repetitive "missions," awful motorbike driving, cringe dialogue. Generic visual style that feels nothing like the original game. Avoid.

Refunded after about 30 minutes of play.