REVIEW – Does anyone even remember Fear Effect? It came out in 2000, followed by the prequel a year later on the PlayStation, which was pretty much going out slowly at that point. Returning to a long-abandoned franchise was a risky move, and it’s not a shame to admit that it didn’t work out that well for the game!

Sushee‘s Fear Effect: Sedna got 107 thousand euros on Kickstarter from a bit over 2500 backers. The developers used a different approach to the gameplay and the camera angles. Instead of going with cel-shaded models and a 2.5D look as seen in the originals, instead, we received an isometric game, which is entirely different from what we could have gotten used to by this franchise in the past. (The fixed cameras did stay, though.)

Are you cyberpunk?

We are four years after the events of the first game – Hana and Rain, who are in a romantic relationship, try to steal an artifact from Paris, but they are too late to the party. They have to get it back, and thus, they take a trip to Greenland. What on Earth is going on with weak games featuring female protagonists and Paris? Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness also had its ties to the French capital, too, and that was also a terrible game…

This is where I could go into the problems. There’s a few. I think the biggest issue with Fear Effect: Sedna is not FEAR Effect. There’s no fear here! The game doesn’t suit the name at all – and the gameplay also changed from the survival horror-like tone to navigating up to four characters around. The audiovisuals don’t help matters either. The graphics look like they could work on a PlayStation 2, and the voice acting is one of the worst I have heard this year so far. The last game I played (Life is Strange: Before the Storm’s bonus episode) was the opposite. It’s just dry, and terrible.

Mixture

The gameplay went for a strategic, tactical touch. The combat, the puzzle solving, and getting the medkits – these three things you will do the most, as one: the artificial intelligence is anything but intelligent, two: there are tons of medkits on the maps, and three: the strategy doesn’t always work, because while you could stop the combat and plan out the moves for the characters, the way the game functions doesn’t make your plans pay off several times aside from maybe pulling off a one-hit stealth kill.

This gigantic sentence could be expanded by how the AI works, too: in my opinion, it looks like the game attacks the character I use at the moment on purpose, so the situation is very smart: the more my character is excited, the more it gets hurt (and the opposite: the less excitement, the better your damage output – it’s the trademark gameplay element of the franchise), but I have to keep swapping around to heal, and after a while, I just get bored and just use a brute force approach to make sure I stay alive.

However, the puzzle solving could have been one of the greatest aspects of Fear Effect: Sedna. Avoiding the security cameras is regular, but unlocking a handcuff or defusing a bomb isn’t common in other games, and it helped the gameplay and the ambiance… until I got a Game Over screen. Whose dumb idea was that? Also, it keeps playing a cutscene after that, and thank God I can skip it every time…

Sedna: Sedation Not Available

I can ONLY recommend this game for those who are fans of the franchise and have played the first two titles. Everyone else should just get Transistor. This game is just barely in the midfield of games. It’s full of clichés, and if I received as many five dollar notes as I heard „This time, it’s personal” in the game, I wouldn’t be starving at the moment ;). The strategy would have been a significant plus if it wasn’t unnecessary most of the time, which just throws the concept in the trash can altogether.

Fear Effect: Sedna wanted to be an isometric strategy, but it rather feels like an unfinished, half-way complete product. The reason why I give it a 4.5/10 is that I feel the game lost itself. It could have been way better with a little more care, but instead, it’s just below average – it even lacks common sense a few times, too… (because you need one certain person’s fingerprints to proceed, no other dead bodies of the enemies would work!)

-V-

Publisher: Forever Entertainment / Square Enix

Developer: Sushee

Genre: isometric „strategy,” shooter, puzzle

Release date: March 6, 2018