Flashback Demo

Everyone thinks fondly of certain video games from the past, even if they happen to be bad ones. However, if you really need to relive the experience, you can simply fire up an emulator, or even try to boot up the actual console, because these are the only two ways you can achieve that. Instead, Ubisoft came up with the idea to remake one such game and bring it into the 21st century, technology-wise.

Flashback is a 3D platformer it is actually a “reimagination” of the original title, not a new one and definitely not a remake. It may look a lot like a remake and it may even have exactly same name, but many things have changed in the meantime and it’s all about presenting the players with more or less the same experience, only with modern graphics. While that may sound like the definition of a reboot, that’s only because it’s exactly that, except Ubisoft won't acknowledge it.

In any case, the story still revolves around the famous Conrad and the action takes place more or less in the same environments, where you have to battle the same enemies and try to survive the journey all the way to the end. Although the team behind the game is supposedly the same it was twenty years ago, this does not really feel as overwhelming as one would expect. In fact, the plot is quite weak and the characters don’t really have any depth to them.

When you get to actually play around with the controls and try to perform some of the stunts you are required do, things become a bit more annoying. As it happens, the gameplay is not as refined as it should be in order to make the platformer gimmick work properly, since you often find yourself falling to your death, or unable to manage the shooting aspect. Speaking of which, the AI is pretty awful as well, not to mention the fact that the enemies become difficult to kill after a while.

Thankfully, the only part that truly shines at the game is the graphics engine, mostly because it’s actually Unreal Engine 3. As such, both the environments and the character animations look impressive, not to mention the textures and the post-processing effects that create the proper atmosphere for a sci-fi flick. Sound-wise, everything seems to be decent, but decent is not the kind of adjective you want to throw around when talking about Flashback, one of the most highly-regarded platformers of all time.

All things being equal, Flashback is not exactly a good game, at least not in this form. The developers toyed with a few new ideas and most of them do not work as intended, which is why the entire construct crumbles. However, it’s not a bad game either, because it still has that specific atmosphere it always had, only in a more modern package.