Flashback Reviews

um dos jogos que não comprei para a mega drive mas queria mesmo. e ainda bem!! com o que custavam ia ficar bem lixado. os controlos são do piorio. frustrado com os puzzles, tudo bem. lidar com um laggado mental, nem por isso.

Nostalgic! I never finished this as a kid, and finally did in 2025. The game has super clunky controls, but I managed to enjoy it, and get through it nonetheless.

I think this will be a tentative recommendation. I'm not sure where to start, with this release or the video game, but let's talk about the game itself I suppose. So, Flashback is somehow one of the best selling French video games of all time, it has been released to many different platforms, and yet it's a game with only a little over 400 reviews on Steam at this time. It's an action-adventure game I suppose as the store page says, that much is true. It's also something of a platformer, because you will be doing a lot of running, jumping, and climbing up ledges. Your guy, Conrad, can walk, run, jump, climb, and with his GUN he can shoot everything to death with unlimited ammo and you just have to hold down the fire button to get him to attack. This ends up being gradually more and more important as you play through the game. The basic structure is, you are presented with a level. Then you do stuff in it. For the first half, it's something of a diverse experience. The first level is mostly exploration with some shooting here and there. The second level has you running a bunch of errands around town. After that, during the second half of the game however, pretty much every level and almost every screen, you are up against one or more enemies and you just have to hold down the shoot button most of the time to dispatch them. Certain enemies demand a little more from you, including using what is basically a parry (the Force Shield), and sometimes a whole lot of dodge rolling. There's several different difficulties for this game. Easy, Normal, Expert. There's also 'rewind' and 'non-rewind' mode, which is a feature introduced with this port I suppose. I played on Expert non-rewind since the first level was challenging but I figured well, if I'm having this much trouble, Expert surely can't be that much worse. And, it turned out to be way harder than I was expecting, so if you DO play this game, I don't recommend playing on Expert. I think that the main problem is with how combat-heavy this game gets later, it's shockingly uninteresting for the most part. Enemies in the last level in particular are just a nightmare to deal with. You basically get a means however, to restore your life to full whenever you want, though it's not completely free, it usually means you have to walk back to where you were fighting, it just takes a while. So in Flashback, you die when you are shot 5 times. You can restore your hit points by interacting with a recharge station which fills up your shield. You need shield to survive hits. Enemies in this game don't ever do more than 1 damage to you at a time, and you get very long invulnerability frames afterwards, which is nice. However, on Expert in particular, enemies take MANY many hits to actually kill (8, 10, 12 shots or something ridiculous for every enemy, I don't know, I never kept track, I just know it's a lot) and the game spawns WAY more enemies. There are multiple screens in the first level, on Easy mode, where there are no enemies whatsoever, and it's just your chance to explore. On Expert, all of these screens have anywhere from 1-3 enemies on them. Enemy reaction times also increase based on difficulty, to the point where if you play on Expert, many enemies if they are on the same level as you for even a few frames, will instantly aim and fire at you and there's not a lot you can do except hope you are REALLY good at using your Force Shield at the right time. The challenge in Expert also really just comes down to not losing focus, and not getting greedy. You're just constantly incentivized by enemies chipping away your health, to just go back to the nearest recharge station, get your health back, and return to chip away at the enemies. This is mostly very very tedious, especially when sometimes it takes multiple trips back and forth between recharger and battlefield to clear out a single room! The way you fight enemies is generally very repetitive and simple. For every enemy, you just have to manipulate their AI and get them to stand where you want them to stand, so you can can shoot them to death as easily as possible. Any time an enemy gets away from you, very bad things happen, so it's mandatory to figure out the weaknesses in their AI. For example cops can't retaliate against you if you wait for them to step just barely onto the edge of the screen, then you shoot them. The graphics and the animation in this game are really spectacular and every level has a unique look to it. You get enough of each one, and yet none really wears out its welcome. What felt like the longest level, the last one, doesn't at all get boring since it's so visually interesting. The animation is really smooth and it makes me wish that more video games today looked as good as this. The main thing it seems like they actually remastered was the sound, or they tried anyway. I played with the oldschool soundtrack, which I think was the correct choice, since trying to make all new, high quality sound for an old game like that... well, it really just doesn't match, in my opinion. I like most of the sound of this game, except the music, because though there was some decent music in this game it's so sparse. There were many occasions when I was thinking, that, having a nice chill background track would be really good for some areas. In Flashback as it is, music seems to only really play once in a while when you enter specific parts of certain screens, or, if you draw your weapon then sometimes it plays like a 16 second piece of music. I think it would have improved the game even if it just had blanket pieces of wallpaper music for each level, ideally unobtrusive stuff that just helps to set the mood. Anyway, so the game is okay. It's not the best thing I have ever played, but it looks great and I think if you were playing on Easy probably also with rewind on, you might have more fun playing this game. As for this release... Well, it's kind of buggy. I already mentioned their remastered soundtrack kinda sucks. The awful filters they tried to add in the graphics menu can fortunately be turned off, but they default to ON if you select modern AND in my experience, Bloom and Antialiasing ALWAYS were on, even when they were not ticked in the options menu they STILL continued to be on, so you have to enable them then disable them again! There's other bugs too, more troubling ones. Myself and several other players experienced, after a certain point, our save file moving from slot 1 to slot 3... it's pretty much inexplicable. Fortunately, I haven't heard of anyone's save data being corrupted but it's not something you really want to see. I'm also not sure if this means that your game always saves to slot 3 if you get to or past a certain point in the game? I just don't know. The main menu, all of the menus in fact are INCREDIBLY slow. It feels like navigating the menus is as unresponsive as the 90s platformer man you control in this game. That's not great to say the least. Additionally there's really no special features to this game or anything, there's a weird 'street art' point system, but the points are completely bugged and will respawn whenever they feel like it, seemingly, so it's very easy to get more points than you need. And what is this 'street art' point system? Well, it lets you unlock street art. Like, photos of 'street art'. Which appears to be just... someone made mosaics of Conrad's sprites and put them on random buildings and things and then took photos of that, and now it's just in the game. I actually might have been interested in a developer commentary track, or even a short film in that vein, or something, but there's really nothing like that, it's just the game pretty much. I think I got this game for $1 on sale, so, it's probably worth picking up. I think this is an OK game that is probably more enjoyable just for the aesthetics of the game, than the gameplay itself, which is only alright.