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 hilarious story moments – like when a certain supporting character is abruptly killed off, only to return safe and sound in the next chapter like the instantly reversed demise of Chewbacca in The Rise of Skywalker.
Stupor Metroid
Meanwhile, combat is theoretically more robust thanks to the spatial depth offered by the 2.5D level design, but fussy thumbstick-based targeting makes fights against larger groups of enemies woefully imprecise, and any attempts at stealth are futile since every guard seems to have eyes in the back of their heads. I also found the 30-second timer on the use of weapon power-ups to be rather impractical, and more often than not I’d pick up the mortar rounds or heavy pistol ammo in the last few seconds of a fight, then be forced to waste them by pointlessly firing at walls since I couldn’t carry them into the next scrap.
Additionally, the added depth to each area introduced an inherent clumsiness that had me regularly getting stuck on the edges of doorways or staircases, stumbling through solid objects like they were holograms, and eventually just falling directly through the floor and trapping myself in out of bounds areas that forced me into checkpoint restarts. You know it’s a bad sign in an action game when you spend just as much time reloading saves as you do your pistol.
Playing on PlayStation 5, I’d occasionally come out of one of Flashback 2’s surprisingly lengthy loading screens only for everything to stay black, even though I could hear the ambient sounds of the world and my own footsteps as I aimlessly wandered around in the dark until I reloaded. In another instance my gun just stopped working in the middle of a firefight, despite the fact that Conrad’s pistol is blessed with infinite ammo at all times. So once again I had to reload my save, except this time my gun continued to fail at the exact same moment, and did so over and over again with each subsequent attempt as my frustration mounted.
Eventually I decided to brute force my way through that particular confrontation with heavily armoured guards and bots using a liberal mix of medkits and Conrad’s feeble and thoroughly uncoordinated melee attacks, which given the overwhelming odds stacked against me unsurprisingly led to my first proper death in Flashback 2. That led me to stumble on one of the most bizarre design choices of all: You see, Flashback 2’s Game Over screen somewhat confusingly features two very similar options; ‘Resume’ and ‘Continue Game’. If you choose to continue, a list of your previous manual and checkpoint saves pops up for you to load from, which is more or less what you’d expect.
However, if you choose to resume, then Conrad just magically comes back to life on the spot with almost a full health bar, no questions asked. That effectively neuters every enemy threat in Flashback 2, and both the collectable medkits and Conrad’s rechargeable shield are rendered almost entirely unnecessary since anytime you get killed you can always get straight back up and walk it off like you just lost a lounge room NERF gun battle. It’s enough to make your average Dark Souls fan suffer a case of the vapours.
To be clear, this isn’t merely a feature of Flashback 2’s easiest difficulty setting, and you can trust me when I say that because Flashback 2 doesn’t actually have any difficulty settings. It just defaults to resurrection mode, almost as though the developers were so acutely aware of how likely it was to break that they added the resume function in a desperate attempt to keep Flashback 2 propped up on its feet like the corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s.
Block to the Future
Rising from the dead like an unstoppable terminator can only get you so far, however, as I found out roughly five hours into Flashback 2’s story. Despite the many bugs and consistently low stakes combat, I’d still managed to slog my way through the uninspired story sections that have been rehashed from the original campaign, and in most cases made worse. The Running Man-inspired Death Tower game show has been swapped out for a clumsy mech battle that offers all the tactical depth and precision of a worn-out set of Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots, while a return trek through the Titan Jungle region is made to be infinitely more painful due to the presence of a companion character who straight up refuses to follow you at times.
However, my progress ground to a complete halt when I found myself trapped inside a boss fight arena with no actual boss to fight, and no way to cheaply “resume” my way through it. After my umpteenth loading of a prior save game, I retraced my steps and discovered the reason – the hulking monster that was supposed to chase me down and confront me in a subterranean cavern had gotten stuck at the top of a flight of stairs, seemingly hesitant to take any further steps down like ED-209 at the end of the original RoboCop. What followed was a positively ludicrous scenario in which I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, as I tried to push and prod the beast down the stairs and into the boss fight arena, with it stubbornly refusing to comply – a bit like trying to get your cat into the carrier when it knows full well that you’re trying to take it to the vet. All the while the objective at the top left corner of the screen said ‘Escape the creature’. I guess… I was the creature now?
Still, after wasting an exhausting couple of hours trying I could not force this fight-fearing freak into battle, and it was only after Flashback 2 received its first post-release patch that the creature magically appeared inside the boss fight arena and I was able to confront it – and yet it still wouldn’t take me on! Instead it just marched on the spot up against the far wall of the arena, unable to escape and completely unwilling to fight. It was clear that the electrified pools in the middle of the area were intended to be used to shock the monster to death, but since I couldn’t bait it into attacking me and thus lure it into an electrified demise, I just shot it. And shot it. And shot it. In fact, I kept the trigger held down for well over half an hour, as I emptied a John Wick movie’s worth of ammunition into its conflict-avoiding arse without a health bar or any form of visible damage to clue me into how close, if at all, it was getting to death.
Eventually, after taking a break to ice my cramping trigger finger and check my sanity, I considered a different approach, which was to position myself between the monster and the wall he was forlornly plodding against and sort of herd him towards the electrified death traps using melee attacks, which was harder than it sounds since Conrad’s punches and kicks are about as easy to land as a plane with no wheels. However, the good news is that this method eventually brought the beast to an electricity-charged end, and I was able to continue Flashback 2’s story.
The bad news is that not 10 minutes later I had reached another progress-stalling bug, this time involving a special battery I had retrieved from the facility with the peace-loving boss monster. When I tried to return the battery to the village leader who had originally tasked me with collecting it, his response was to instruct me to go and retrieve the very same battery, trapping us in some sort of recursive Abbott and Costello-style comedy routine with no way out. It certainly seemed ironic that despite the fact the battery was in my inventory, I found myself completely powerless to progress beyond that point, and I had to set Flashback 2 aside entirely for several days before a second post-release patch eventually remedied the bug (while at the same time, making that quest-giving NPC invisible).
I’m relatively happy to report that I didn’t hit any further game-breaking glitches beyond that point and was subsequently able to complete the story after about 10 miserable hours, but I’m sorry to say that doesn’t mean the remainder of Flashback 2 wasn’t still rife with control problems, forced restarts, characters and enemies that blink in and out of existence, and frequent animation glitches, all culminating in a calamitous final boss encounter that was about as well constructed as a barbecue assembled by Homer Simpson. Throughout, Flashback 2 is also plagued by sustained framerate dips so severe that at times I wondered if the developers had deliberately forgone the stylishly rotoscoped animation of the original in favour of the sloppiest form of stop-motion. The original Flashback was heavily inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall, but the closest Flashback 2 will ever get to a Total Recall is if publisher Microids inevitably has to issue a total recall on every copy sold.
It’s particularly disappointing because I look back on 1992’s Flashback with genuinely fond memories, and with its 1995 follow-up Fade to Black transporting Conrad’s adventures into a full 3D game world, I’ve long yearned for a Flashback sequel that more closely resembled the side-scrolling original. But unfortunately this is very much like copping a middle finger from the Monkey’s Paw, and not too dissimilar to spending 30 years wishing for a new movie that features the original Ghostbusters cast, only to be forced to uncomfortably sit through the decidedly off-putting appearance of a CGI’d ghost of the late great Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters Afterlife. Flashback 2 is similarly ill-advised and equally lacking in soul.
