Flashback 2 Review

ign.com:

Released in 1992 for the Commodore Amiga and then a year later on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, the original Flashback was so groundbreakingly cinematic that it was initially advertised as being a “CD-ROM game on a cartridge.” Sadly its long-awaited sequel, Flashback 2, doesn’t break any new ground – but it does manage to break in almost every other way imaginable. Poorly presented, sloppily executed, and absolutely lousy with progress-stalling bugs, I’m not sure you could experience a Flashback more unpleasant than this even if you’d dropped all the acid at Woodstock.

You wouldn’t know that it’s been 31 years since the original Flashback, partly since Flashback 2’s story runs concurrently with that of its predecessor and features a similar aliens posing as humans plot, but mainly because this disastrous side-scrolling sequel seemingly ignores every advancement made in game design over the past three decades. Basic collision detection? Responsive controls? Functional AI? Forget it. Flashback 2’s adventure feels heavily compromised in all facets right from the opening moments in its cyberpunk-tinged city of New Washington, and it only gets worse from there.

In so many ways, Flashback 2 feels shockingly inferior to the original. In place of the cutscenes that bridged gameplay sections that remain striking to this day, we now get static talking head sequences with character faces so unremarkable that they may well have been collectively created in an afternoon by an AI art generator. Returning hero Conrad Hart was a man of few words in the original, but now he won’t shut up in Flashback 2, woodenly delivering dumps of exposition like he’s the narrator in a high school play. There are also some unintentionally