Flashback

It's a shame the buggy controls make fighting through it a chore. [Issue#139, p.115]

While nostalgic, Flashback doesn’t necessarily pay tribute to its predecessor. Superfluous content mixed with poor level design and frustrating bugs should be enough to keep you from playing this more than once, no matter how much you loved the original.

A great-looking remake of a classic game, but playing it is an exercise in confusion and frustration.

Remaking a 20-year-old hit is a difficult challenge, and we must admit that in the case of "Flashback", the result is far from convincing. Not that the game is bad in all areas, there are some enjoyable moments, but each element of the game, whether it's story, gameplay, narrative, art direction or new additions are not relevant. Disappointing.

This is exactly the wrong way of making an homage to a classic. The original was stylish, mysterious and tense, this version just can be described as bland in every possible way.

If you’re dying for something similar to Flashback, and don’t mind wrestling with some control issues, an inferior story and a generic art-style, then this may be what you’re looking for. Otherwise, you’d best just sit tight and hope that someone decides to make a version of the original game with a slightly higher resolution.

In this modern remake, the original vision is lost in favor of trying to reach a new generation of potential fans with some half-baked ideas on what would make A Cool Sci-Fi Game™. And in the process of doing that, Flashback has lost its identity entirely.

Flashback was never an arcade game, so I have no idea why this is featured. It's a shame that such a revered classic has received such a soulless re-imagining, especially considering the people involved. It's never awful, but its lack of personality is almost worse than being all-out dire.

Stripped of its namesake, Flashback is a middling action game rife with bugs and small annoyances that add up to an experience that is perhaps best wiped from any player's memory.

A disappointing game with little to offer. The original had its eyes toward the future, very deliberately trying to do things differently. Great remakes are able to adapt, modifying and expanding upon the previous game’s ideas. Here there’s hardly more than recycled concepts and a total failure to capitalize on the first game’s potential. Improvements are few, and many of the updates make things worse instead of better.

Updating an old game is always something of a balancing act as developers work to maintain what made the original game great, while bringing it up to speed with modern conventions. Unfortunately, Flashback HD fails on both accounts.

As much as it was an enjoyable exercise in nostalgia, compared to the standards set by today’s games Flashback falls short. The bottom line is this game borders on being technically flawed. Story doesn’t make up for this or the shortcomings of elementary gameplay.

While Flashback HD isn’t completely broken, it’s the fact that they remade such a classic and screwed the pooch with it.