Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix -PS1- 7

June 3, 2024

I played through Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix this past week. I enjoyed beating the original Fear Effect two years ago, so I was really excited to see how the sequel stacks up. This is another solid action adventure title with beguiling graphical flair, but it does come up just short of how much I liked the original by the end.

Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix is a visual treat. The mix of anime with rotoscoping returns here and it looks just as remarkable as it did before. The backgrounds are all brought to life with full motion video, and the attention to detail is staggering. This looks and feels just like an anime movie set in futuristic Hong Kong. I loved exploring the environments, even if it was sometimes hard to find key spots.

The gameplay is much like a lot of survival horror games inspired by the original Resident Evil, and it does feel a bit dated by today’s standards. The tank controls, fixed camera angles, and puzzles are all here. I was a fan of games like this back in the 1990’s, so I still had a good time discovering the secrets in Retro Helix. Some of the puzzles were delightfully clever brain teasers. But others were so obscure that I had to resort to an internet guide in order to solve them.

Retro Helix also gives each playable character several guns and plenty of ammunition. This is a good quality-of-life improvement over the original, in which ammo was scarce. There are also instant load times after death, which is a big plus.

Retro Helix takes place a couple years before the original game. The plot here revolves around a virus (called “EINDS”) that is threatening the world’s population. Hanna and her friend Rain start off the game by infiltrating a corporate party to steal some DNA samples that have something to do with the virus, and they eventually run into Deke and Glass, who were in the first game. Much of the backstory about the virus is confusing and just briefly mentioned here and there. I felt like the plot and setup about kidnapping in the original game enthralled me more than the virus plot here.

Towards the end of Retro Helix, there is a more vague chatter about a group of immortals and their history with humans from thousands of years ago. It’s all just talked about, but never shown. I would have liked some flashback scenes to flesh out the ancient lore better. The original Fear Effect had its fair share of Chinese mythology, but in Retro Helix I found the references to old legends to be even more aloof.

Hanna is still an awesome lead character, and her new friend Rain is fun to play as, too. There are some plot twists about Rain towards the end that, again, are quickly talked about and explained in a rushed manor. This further adds to the frustrating ambiguity of the plot and diminished the impact of the ending for me.

I am giving Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix a 7 out of ten. I liked it, but the first one was a little better. There is good fun here if you like old school action-adventure games, and the visuals are spellbinding. I just wish the plot had not relied on so much lore-dumping, especially towards the end.