It was off on a great start, but the experience nose dived at the last minute.
Now the second game is out and I have to say that I've been anticipating its release. Giving a developer the chance to smooth down the little snags of a previous game sounds rational and for a while I really felt like everything had been smoothed out. For awhile...
The game takes place two years after the last game in the nearby town of Fallcreek, home of Fallcreek University. We're introduced to a number of youthful college kids who have been experimenting with the local plant life for indulgent reasons, specifically strange flowers that have been growing around campus that occasionally causes some fantastically scary hallucinations (well, A hallucination, but damn was it awesome). Their idyllic lives are crushed by this flower one night when the buds open and black, misty spores start infecting the kids one by one. Those infected with the spores transform into blood thirsty monsters while those uninfected struggle to stay alive. Much like the last game, the sequel presents some minor plot twists, some contrived, some guess-able and some unique but presented blandly as if they were actual facts. It's hard to say if the story really has improved over the last game, but if anything the struggle of the characters is much more involving.
The returning characters consist of least personal favorites Kenny and Stan with no.1 favorite Shannon topping the returner's list mostly because of the unfortunate curse she has of forever wearing micro-miniskirts and tasty leggings. Thankfully though, each of the three returners have developed since their survival at Leafmore and it shows in the change of their personalities immensely: Shannon is much stronger in will and strength, Kenny has gotten emotionally weaker and Stan has ceased using the word 'Dawg' every five minutes (and is apparently voiced by Christian Slater).
Of the new-comers there's Amy Brooke, a white version of Ashley from the last game but with the ability to solve broken-up puzzles, the lovable Sven Hansen who looks like a beefy Walter Sullivan who could probably kick Sullivan's @$$ and eat his angsty, long haired, incongruous butt for breakfast and the saucy duo of the new comers Mei and Jun, the former being a competent character entry able to hack into locked computer terminals and access codes and the latter being the equivalent of Mayu Amakura from Fatal Frame 2.
Then there's Corey Wilde, an occasionally whiny, well dressed monkey-like troll thing resembling the illegitimate son of Richard Braintree. While Corey seems to replace Josh from the last game in being an earthen color wearing whiner, I have to say I liked Corey a lot: he seemed to be the only character I could really root for as he went around promising vengeance to those who harmed his friends and he delivered it in the best way possible. Plus his agile movements (or acrobatics as they're called) were very welcomed to me as I've always wanted to control at least one survival horror game character who could get to hard-to-reach places on his own.
For the most part the characters balanced out their adolescent whining and collective snarkiness and they acted human enough so I was able to root for them despite their two dimensional features. The sad thing about the characters though is that we didn't get enough time to see their emotions come out: every time the fog of tragedy inundated a character, they would get up to thirty seconds to emotionally react, any dialogue that reflected their feelings was succinct and the dramatic potential for character development quickly flattened leaving only a few air bubbles of personality change. Which is weird, because the atmosphere to Aftermath is darker and more of a personal atmosphere where the characters are thrown into a cruel and nightmarish world that strips them of all their personal joys and reminds them of their little faults. I think just about the only death scenes that had any long lasting emotional impact were the ones that involved the victim getting killed by an electric power tool.
The game play has actually improved a bit over the last game while surprisingly staying the same. Personally, I've never been a fan of permanent 2D control schemes in Survival Horror games (ObsCure 1, Silent Hill 4 and pretty much every Fatal Frame game) because the constant switching of camera angles will quickly change the layout of the control every time you enter a new room.
ObsCure 2 doesn't have this problem because the camera can be rotated around the player with the right analog stick for almost every area and every time you go into combat mode, the camera sets itself a few feet behind the player character and pivots with you when you move them. The aptitudes of the characters are back, but the emphasis on their importance has been polished immensely. There are different areas requiring the abilities of specific characters and the variety of tasks they have to perform in order to continue adds a new level of variety to the game. In some cases you'll have to think through the 3D environment in order to get the job done: Corey will have to jump around on different ledges while Sven has to push a dolly loaded with boxes over and I must say that this game has probably the best lock-picking interface I've ever experienced. With that aside, the puzzle section is thankfully present and though not as challenging as the puzzles of the common Silent Hill game, none of them are painstakingly simple.
Inventory managing is much easier now seeing how it's all organized in a non-Real-Time menu (Screw Real-Time menus) allowing you to organize and distribute weapons to characters with the game paused. The item selection is still of the same 'hold a trigger down and select your item' scheme, but it's not that way for the weapons: You assign weapons to your partner in the inventory screen by putting them on either of the directional pad buttons which allows you to switch between one of four weapons on the fly!
The addition of Quick Time Events sounds painfully intrusive at first, but unlike most games the QTE in ObsCure 2 are surprisingly manageable; this and Cold Fear could be the only games I've played where Quick Time Events didn't suck, didn't hinder the atmosphere of a horror game setting and in some cases actually made sense. The QTEs of ObsCure 2 are never unpredictable, you can almost always tell when they appear. They are actually a part of the game rather than just being in a cut scene. My favorite part about the QTEs of ObsCure 2 though has to be the fact that the buttons are never random: the game never throws any unpredictable button combinations at you, the buttons you have to press are very specific. You'll have to tap the O button (the selected character's aptitude) to do things like hoisting yourself up and lifting up your partner and you'll have to tap the X button to struggle from a monster's grasp or push down a heavy lever.
There are some nitpicks to add to the game play though. In single player, your partner can get in the way, especially when you're trying to climb on a ledge to evade monsters and they're standing on the edge preventing you from climbing up. Switching between characters and healing them at will tends to lag a bit near the end of the game. The absolute worst part about the game play is the lack of a map screen! Yes, I'm serious: no map. While there aren't too many places to search in the game, lacking a map to tell where you've been and where you haven't makes navigation confusing and disorienting in some areas. It doesn't even make sense in some cases like when Amy clearly scraps together a torn up floor layout solely for the purpose of reading a code written on it rather than using it for navigation!
Another huge nitpick to game play that is mildly manageable is that the game has highly unintuitive boss fights. Unlike the last game, you actually have boss encounters for certain levels and in some cases you need to do something specific in order to defeat the boss. It's just that you get no indication of what you're supposed to do in order to beat em'! Once you figure out what you need to do for some of them you'll find it's painfully easy, sure, but the game never makes any clear indication as to what you're supposed to do in most of the encounters.
Something that I loved about the first Obscure was the fact that you could tape flashlights to your guns (which doesn't make much sense for pistols seeing how the top of those things always jerk back when you fire them), but sadly you can't in this addition. Which I have to point out that the flashlights in this game appear out of nowhere. I'm serious, the only time I ever literally picked up a flashlight was once and it doubled as a weapon. Every time the kids enter a dark place, they whip out a flashlight! What are they handing out flashlights for free on campus?
The sound department hasn't changed too much as a lot of sounds were recycled from the last game, but thankfully the B-Grade sound effects were only touched occasionally this time around.
The soundtrack has improved fro the most part: the orchestrated parts are amazingly emotional pieces that were used ineffectively (kind of like in the last game or in Silent Hill 4). The choir on the other hand was used in select areas that made the moments surprisingly effective. The chanting of the choir thanks to Olivier Deriviere is used in very specific moments in the game that were succinct, but terrific to hear. The game actually uses some rock riffs for variety and occasional atmosphere, but it was all background noise for me for the most part; it was effective to a degree, but it didn't give me a long enough impression.
On an aesthetic note, I'm happy to say that his game features a bit more gore than its Politically Correct predecessor: while the character death scenes aren't too sickening, the nameless NPC deaths are fantastically repulsive in the first part of the game. I know this sounds like a completely one sided side note, but a game as shallow as ObsCure NEEDED more repulsive/painful looking deaths beyond one NPC character.
The graphics are... well, hard to describe. They are definitely better than the last game in that everyone's eyes are visible and the characters look more human, but in-game and out, the graphics are passable, but not award winning. Some of the cut-scene graphics are laughable as Shannon and Mei apparently possess strange, plastic faces and greasy, chromed hairdos.
The in-game graphics are fine, though the character models are WAY too similar regardless of individual character (they raise their flashlights at the same time!) and there was at least one moment where walking into a slightly shady area turned my character into a pitch black, featureless shadow creature.
Despite the nit-picks though, the experience of Obscure 2 was a surprisingly fun excursion into old-school (aka: actual) Survival Horror gaming: the atmosphere was mild but dark and creative at times, the characters weren't deep but enjoyable, the climax to the final boss fight kicked mountains of @$$ and game play was deliciously groovy...
That is until the end credits stopped rolling and I was shoved head long into a painfully intrusive FINAL CHAPTER that took all the fun I had and drowned it in a toilet full of century old rectal deposits.
The final chapter of the game introduced a flurry of horribleness on an inconceivably insulting scale: the plot twists that occurred were derivative to the point of reducing brain cells, the death scenes lacked the horrific awesomeness from before, my favorite character suddenly fell into a loop hole of continuity bending nonsensical bull$#!t and the ending was retarded as %&$*!
Had the game ended twenty seconds into the epilogue and left us with a big cliffhanger promising a third sequel, I would've been able to let my rage go, but as it ended ObsCure 2 became so inundated with crap that my previous joys felt completely unsatisfied. I realize now that the final chapter of the game was the single moment in which the developers tried to make the game resemble more and more of the long, lost, but hardly missed dark age of horror movie history called the Teen Horror genre where adults can't be trusted, the characters are a bunch of jerks, the story is badly written and the ending has to have some kind of stupid high note despite the darkness of the circumstances.
Overall, I'm left a little ambivalent about this game; from my perspective, the game was wasted potential as a unique and emotionally effective horror experience. It actually introduced new and interesting concepts of fear in Survival Horror games, but it treated them as though they were hardly important at all. Add that to the anti-atmospheric and idiotic final chapter and it left me with a mild feeling of nihilism.
The game play was slinky though, so I still recommend it, just not as strongly as I'd like to.