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User Rating: 7.8 | Helix: Fear Effect PS
By mort2fire | Review Date:
Now let us consider a piece of junk, if I may borrow a line from an old piece of film criticism. The junk in this case is not The Night Porter, though, it's the Resident Evil control scheme, which is now surviving into a second hardware generation, as well as a second Fear Effect, and not showing signs of sucking any less. I wonder whether Shinji Mikami, or whoever it is that came up with the idea, knew exactly what he was unleashing when he conceived of this scheme several years ago. Probably he thought it was just a stopgap, something to make do with until designers got a better handle on how to deal with a 3D environment. If only.

That's what Fear Effect 2 defaults to, although if you dig very deep in the options menu you can switch from "Classic" to "3D" controls, which swaps you over to something approximating Metal Gear-style control. This improves the situation a little, but you can tell it's an adaptation of the default controls rather than something entirely new -- the characters still turn in slow arcs and pivot on an invisible rod lodged through their spine.

This makes for the usual spots of clumsiness. The automatic turn-around and auto-aim work reasonably well, but you'll still die plenty of times thanks to the vagaries of the control scheme, auto-aim, camera, and enemy placement (my favorite part is in the hedge maze on disc 2, where you can be killed by invisible enemies located around turns) until you realize that repeated diving rolls can spirit you past a great many threats with ease. Perhaps this is intentional, something like the Heart of Darkness/Out of this World puzzle-solving-through-repeated-death concept. Thankfully, the save points are a little more frequent in the sequel.

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