Nick Scryer meets Solid Snake...almost.

User Rating: 8.6 | Second Sight PS2
In the war between Psi-Ops and Second Sight, it seems most people think Psi-Ops is the better game. After playing Second Sight for a few hours I initially agreed with them. However, after completing the game, I think when all is said and done Second Sight wins, hands down. It is holistically a better game. The strengths – 1. The story is more compelling. Roughly half of Second Sight is played through flashbacks and though the ending didn’t quite pack the punch I had hoped it would, it was still far more interesting to get to than it was in Psi-Ops. 2. The controls in Second Sight are better by far. This game forces you to auto-target and while in most games I generally don’t like this feature, I found in a game like this it was nearly necessary. One of Psi-Ops’ serious flaws, in my opinion, is that you have to meticulously aim your reticle in the heat of a battle and hope you’ve properly targeted your enemy. While this works well in games like Mercenaries where you’re firing off a dozen rounds of ammo, it falls short when you have to precisely lock onto your enemy and not some crate or barrel lying nearby. Unlike Psi-Ops’ flawed controls, in Second Sight I never experienced a sense of frustration when trying to target exactly who I wanted to. (*Note – There is a caveat to this, but I’ll add that later on in the flaws section.) 3. Second Sight does not rely too heavily on the novelty of the psychic powers, but rather incorporates them nicely into an all around solid game. If you were to take the psychic abilities (especially telekinesis) out of Psi-Ops, you’d be left with a generic game. In my opinion the developers put too much emphasis on the psychic powers instead of using them as enhancements. In Second Sight, I felt that the psychic abilities were on par with the overall combat system and were never meant to be the entire focus of the game’s controls, but rather a nice addition to them. 4. This game is less about storming your enemies head on and tossing them into walls and more about methodically confronting them using stealth and such. Admittedly, this is a personal bias. And I wouldn’t qualify Second Sight as a “stealth” game as such. However, there is a very nice element of stealth involved and the use of such things as sniper rifles and tranquilizer darts to confront the enemy in a more strategic manner. I liked this quality a lot. I found it to be “Solid Snake Lite” if you get my meaning. 5. You are allowed psychic and health regeneration. In Psi-Ops, every time you take a hit and your health gauge is drained, the only way to rebuild it is by finding health packs and such along the way. Not only is this unrealistic, it took away from the experience as a whole. In Second Sight, not only does your psychic energy regenerate on its own, you also have the ability to heal your physical wounds as well. In my opinion, this is a perfect fit. If you’re going to deal with psychic powers, why in the world would you force me to search out obligatory health packs? Second Sight did it right by allowing you the ability to heal yourself as well as naturally regenerate your psychic energy. And while this is all well and good, I can’t say the game is without flaws… The flaws – 1. Auto-targeting. Yes, I know that I said that auto-targeting was one of the game’s strengths a moment ago, however it’s a strength that comes with a compromise. On the one hand, you’ll find auto-targeting is very helpful while using certain psychic abilities; on the other hand, you’ll find it takes away from using your “normal” weapons. Unfortunately, I guess you can’t have it both ways. While you’ll have no problem targeting enemies to pick up with telekinesis, you’ll equally have no problem targeting them with your pistols and machine guns, which takes away from the challenge of the game since all you have to do is auto-lock onto an enemy and fire off a few rounds until he’s dead. Simple. Kind of boring. But if you’ve forgiven other games for this, then you’ll have no problem forgiving Second Sight either. Additionally, the sniper rifle relies a bit less on auto-targeting and in fact has a nice feature I’ve not seen in other games. Instead of going into a whole-screen first-person perspective to aim, a circular window opens up so that you can adjust your rifle’s aim while still seeing everything in front of you normally. This is a great feature regardless of psychic abilities and I think other games should consider using it as well. 2. At first, the game seems rather unpolished and easy. There is a distinct “clunkiness” to this game that is noticeable right from the start. Your character doesn’t move with incredible grace and there are times when he'll walk into and through boxes and such that often times go skittering off into the distance for little apparent reason. Frankly, I was initially put off by this. And in fact, this helped fuel my first impression as this being the worse of the two games. However, as I allowed myself to play further I soon came to forgive this flaw until the point that I no longer even noticed it. So, the game’s a little clunky…who cares when the overall package is good? Right? Also, most of the earlier missions are ridiculously easy (on the “normal” level anyway). It will only take a few swings with your fists before bad guys fall to their death (yes fists, not guns!!). And in one level the AI seemed absolutely idiotic. I approached a group of bad guys, sniping one with a rifle and while the alarm sounded and everyone started rushing in to confront me, once I killed each of the guards – flash – the alarm was silenced and a voice instructed everyone to go about their business as if nothing had happened. Thankfully, this doesn’t last. It seems the developers made the earlier levels too easy in an attempt to give you time to get used to the controls and such. As you play through things will definitely get more difficult and the AI far less dim-witted. 3. The acting in the game could have been better, which is very unfortunate since this is a story driven game. The acting in a game that centers itself around unraveling a story, in my opinion, is as important as tight controls in a platformer. It’s pretty much a necessity. And while the acting isn’t particularly bad in this game, it could have been better. The lead character in particular comes off many times as a guy reading lines more than a man in crisis. And while this did detract from it achieving greatness, it never made the game bad. Also, some of the supporting characters are voiced by the same person. And while they tried to hide this by having the actor speak in different accents and such, you can always tell you’re listening to the same dude over and over again. Not a deal-breaker, but a noticeable flaw. 4. The telekinesis in this game is far worse than in Psi-Ops. In my opinion one of Psi-Ops’ greatest strengths is the ability to pick a person up with your mind and toss him into a wall while watching his body flail with the perfect implementation of rag doll physics. It was a hell of a lot of fun. The telekinesis in Second Sight is lackluster at best. It takes a while for you to get total control of a person and once you do, tossing him around isn’t all that easy or intuitive. As a result I found myself not using the telekinesis power (as a means of attacking) all that often. I ended up using TK only to solve puzzles and such. And while this is a definite flaw, the overall implementation of all the abilities make up for it in the end. By and large, I think the game could have used a bit more polish, yet in the end I still had fun playing it which is most important. And actually I was kind of disappointed when I finished it since I still wanted to play it some more (it’s not a very short game, then again it’s not exactly very long either). The bottom line – I like it better than Psi-Ops and if you think a slower paced, slightly stealthy, story driven game that incorporates unique psychic powers sounds even remotely interesting, you should definitely give it a try or at the very least a rental.