	Second Sight
	Developer: Free Radical Publisher: Codemasters Release Date: Out Now Players: 1	Words By:
The second psychic ability-related third person actioner to grace our consoles this month, Second Sight comes from Free Radical, the makers of Timesplitters. SS consequently looks a lot like a third-person Timesplitters adventure, with the same cartoony, slight offbeat character models and detailed levels. You play John Vattic, who awakens from a coma in what turns out to be a medical facility where he has been subjected to surgery and experimentation. John is a real mess, his body and mind are broken, he doesn't know his name, he can't remember his past, all he knows is that his only hope for survival is to escape and unravel the mystery that has led to his imprisonment. Escaping from the facility is his first task, and it soon becomes clear that his captors not only don’t want him to escape, but fear him as well. As he explores, he finds fragments of his past that reveal involvement in a covert military mission investigating psychic research in Siberia... A mission that went badly wrong, and left him empowered (or cursed) with awesome psychic abilities that can devastate the people and the world around him. Haunted by disturbing flashbacks, tormented by his strange powers and gripped by the sickening fear that he may have been to blame for what happened in Siberia, John Vattic begins searching for some sort of explanation… Via flashbacks the game flits from the present (with John escaping from the research facility) and then back six months in time to the Siberia mission. John starts off as no more than a civilian adviser, but wisely Colonel Starke and WinterICE (the special covert military team that seconded him) trained him in weapons usage and when the bullets start to fly you soon grab a sniper rifle and send some back in the other direction. These early levels in Siberia play much like any other third-person shooter, and the excellent AI gives a nice squad feel to them as your team goes to work, but John learns to harness and control his amazing psychic abilities in the present – it’s a neat, Tarantinoesque way of telling a surprisingly absorbing story. John controls in a pretty standard way before he gains his psychic powers, movement is controlled with the left stick and the right points the camera. You can change to a first person view at any time with a click of R3, but can’t move, only lean around corners. John also does a bit of Solid Snake/Sam Fisher-style sneaking and can hug walls, hang from ledges, crouch, crawl through ducts and pipes and even peek round doors – its even possible to ease a door ajar, pull out you weapon and shoot someone before they even know you’re there! – And Snake and Sam can’t do that. You get a typical selection of weapons throughout the game; I already mentioned the sniper rifle (amazingly it has auto aim in the third-person view which makes things a bit easy), pistols, machine guns and shotguns. John can also punch and kick downed enemies (although he has a tendency to keep trying to punch them when they’re on the floor for some reason). L2 locks onto and highlights targetable objects and persons, and R2 fires your weapon (or psychic power). When John uses his psychic powers things get really interesting. Telekinesis is the first one he remembers how to use, and you can levitate objects (chairs computers, enemies etc.) – enemies can be bashed against walls or lifted high into the air and dropped – if you have a weapon then you can even levitate them and the shoot them! Throwing enemies around with mind power is great fun, and looks really painful too thanks to the excellent ragdoll physics and the fact that you can throw almost anything that isn’t screwed down around too – glass smashes and there’s even quite a bit of destructible scenery, bullet holes and all. Healing is self-explanatory, but smartly you can also heal other people, meaning you make an excellent paranormal medic during the WinterICE squad assaults and co-op sections with the Colonel and other members of the team. Psi Attacks are powerful but drain the psi gauge quickly. A Psi Attack is a focused (best aimed in first person) beam that throws an enemy backwards violently. Psi Blast is like a smart bomb, and send a wave of energy shooting out around you, knocking anyone off their feet but draining all your psi energy (it builds back up in time). Charm is basically the ability to make yourself invisible for a short time. The old MGS2 ‘hide in a locker trick’ works beautifully for John, and if an enemy guard looks in you can just turn the charm on, disappear, and off he goes, mystified as to where you went – sweet or what? Your Charm ability also calms people down if they’re in a disturbed state, and can make them trust and follow you. Projection is another neat trick – basically and out of body experience it allows your ‘spirit’ to scout areas ahead, unlock doors and pass through laser trip alarms. You can also take possession of enemies’ bodies and use them to pull levers, open doors or turn their weapons on their friends. Your abilities are all accompanied by impressive visual effects (particularly the light-bending psi attack), and if you overuse your powers and empty your psi gauge everything goes first a bit woozy, and encourages you to be more careful in the future. Combining powers to get around problems is cleverly worked; for instance there might be a guard locked in a hut that you need to enter. You could just shoot him through the window and risk him alerting fellow guards, so you sneak round the back, peep through the window, distract him by moving something in the room with telekinesis and then kill him with a psi attack – then you can switch back to telekinesis and lift the bar from the door. Neat. Another time you may have to take over control of a guard (you need to make sure John is tucked away somewhere safe when you do this) to unlock a door that requires handprint identification. Figuring out the best way to approach each level and how best to use John’s powers is what makes Second Sight so good, few games mix up gunplay, action, stealth and basic puzzling so well. As in Timesplitters 2 developers Free Radical even slipped an arcade game in to play if you want a break (called Earth Impact, it’s a sort of space war/asteroids clone) and the game even keeps detailed stats for each level, which depending on how competitive with yourself you are, might encourage several replays (I was amazed how little I used the powerful Psi Attack throughout the game). Computer networks play a part in SS, and sometimes you’ll have to access computer terminals and can turn off CCTV cameras that would otherwise have alerted the enemy to your position, but if you spot the cameras you can shoot them or even destroy them with your telekinetic power. At times in the game (mostly due to the fact that you can heal yourself) John will feel so powerful that you’ll feel invincible, but if you flaunt stealth and cleverness too often eventually you’ll be taken down, although it’ll usually take five or six heavily armed guards to do so. John Vattic’s amazing abilities make Second Sight a fascinatingly different adventure, there’s only the similarly themed Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy to compare it to, and it’s difficult to say which is the better game. SS’s only problems are a slightly annoying and intrusive lock-on aiming system (though nowhere near as bad as the laughable one in Headhunter Redemption), the fact that John likes to keep trying to punch downed enemies when he should be kicking them, and a bit of clipping (John and enemies disappear into walls and other objects), otherwise this is a tight and interesting game that’s well worth a look.

Best Bits
- Psi powers are great.
- Good mixture of gameplay styles.
- Excellent physics and AI.
- Interesting story - you’ll want to play to its conclusion.

Worst Bits
- Sometimes annoying and fussy auto-aim feature takes control away from and hinders you, which is daft.
- People really love or hate those weird Free Radical character models.


by: Diddly