Never before had we seen games in which you can master psychic powers, but (paranormal indeeed!)last year we immediately got two at once. They were the action game Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Consipracy and the stealthy action/adventure Second Sight. The latter was clearly the better one of the two and that's why PC-gamers finally get a port, after several months. Most of the time, these games suck donkeydick. Is it any different now?

The game starts when you wake up in a remote facility. You don't know who you are, what you're doing there and why in blazes you're tied to your bed. But then you get a strong headache and miraculously, your cuffs fall off. Congratulations, you have just mastered telekinesis! With it, you can rearrange the hospital's furniture or throw computers at the faces of unsuspecting guards. Your first task however, is to find out your identity and find out why you winded up there in the first place. You are wearing a bracelet that has the name John Vattic written on it, but you have no idea whether that's your real name or not. When you search for files concerning your past, you stumble upon the name of Jayne Wilder. Looking at that name gives you an instant flashback. You now find yourself in a military training facility 6 months earlier to prepare yourself for a mission, mysteriously named WinterICE. Together with a team of crack American soldiers, you have to infiltrate the Siberian village of Dubrensk to investigate paranormal activities (sound a lot like the X-Files, doesn't it?)

Revealing more details about the deep storyline would simply be a shame. Know this: you'll delve deeper into Vattic's past through these playable flashbacks (the levels with the WinterICE team), which I though were more interesting than the mission situated in the present. They don't focus on stealth that much, which makes them less frustrating, and the plot twists in the past are surprising till the end. I won't spoil the ending, but I'm sure Second Sight will have everybody fooled before the ending credits roll.

The storyline is enhanced by a surprisingly good soundtrack. The music fits the game and changes from steaming (durning large-scale shoot-outs for instance) to very subtle (inside a pyschiatric institute). The main characters' voices are casted in an excellent manner, with a lot of feeling into them. This fits the characters very well, because John Vattic sounds as scared as he is and Jayne Wilder really has the "young, naive and invincible" feel around her.

As said, some of the "present" levels contain quite some stealth. Now I can appreciate that but in SS (no, not Hitler's elite troops, not everything has to do with Der Untergang you know ;p) the stealth element hasn't been worked out too well. When you quietly get rid of an enemy it will respawn after a while, something i truly despise. Dead people don't come back to life, do they ? And no, Jesus doesn't count either! When the alarm goes off (and believe me, it will happen more than you want) you'll have to blast your way through hordes of soldiers no matter what, unless you find a closet in which you can hide. Shooting btw is done with a lock-on/auto-aiming system, something that doesn't quite feel right on PC.

As the story proceeds you'll also get more Psi-powers. The previously mentioned Telekinesis gets an upgrade so that you can also use it to throw enemies through the room. Healing speaks for itself. With Psi-Blast you can send a ball of mental energy towards an opponent (instant kill) or create a stunning shockwave. With Charm you temporarily become invisible and with Projection you can have an invisible copy of yourself walking thrugh the levels.
Very handy to get rid of laser fences. With Projection you can also take control over your opponent's mind and have them shoot at their colleagues. That way you can decimate entire groups without ever making your clean shirt dirty.

A lot of neat features indeed, but it is still very clear we're dealing with a consoleport. In general the game controls are pretty responsive, but in narrow corridors the camera spoils a bit of the fun. It flies from one side to another and clipping errors aren't as rare as they should have been.

The graphics are OK, but nothing more than that. The textures don't look too detailed (at least not for a PC-game) and bumpmapping is nowhere to be seen. The game's environments also look a lot like each other, because of the ever-returning gray-, white- and blueish colours. The models on the other hand are well rendered in the typical semi-cartoony style we've come to expect from Free Radical Design (just look at TimeSplitters 2).

If you haven't played Second Sight before, because you don't own a game console, you should definitely give this port a go. The game offers one of the most compelling stories of the last few years and using psi-powers adds a nice twist to the action/adventure genre. However, if you do own a console, it's best to look for a PlayStation 2, GameCube or Xbox copy. The camera won't bother you as much then. Nevertheless, Second Sight is a must-have for everyone. It's not amazingly lengthy (shouldn't take you more than an hour or 8, I suppose),but it'll keep you glued to your screen till the bitter end.!