John Vattic is not having a good day. If you think playing hero in video games is all about spent shells bouncing against hard floors and kicking down titanium reinforced doors to save the day, Second Sight is going to be a hard kick to your genitals. Within your first moments as our unwitting protagonist, you wake up from a coma in a high-security medical facility where you presumably played lab rat for some time, with no memories, and no shirt on your back either. Looking and feeling like you've just been run over by a parade of semi-trailers carrying obese elephants, it's definitely not a good day to be John Vattic.

Free Radical's Second Sight is the latest entry in the stealth-shooter genre, with a twist - psychic powers. Yep, it seems that whatever happened to Vattic in the past has somehow awakened a handful of latent (not to mention neat) abilities that make him both feared and much sought-after by men in dark suits. The game first appears to be a somewhat simplistic stealth shooter with the extra perk of getting to levitate objects, but a few more minutes spent with the game reveals the rather ambitious nature of Second Sight. What we have here are several styles of gameplay mechanics, most of which we have seen in other games, but never in a single package as this.

First of all, Second Sight is a fairly competent third-person shooter for a console. As Vattic, you will receive a fairly comprehensive weapons training that takes you through most of the weapons you are likely to encounter in the game, from pistols, to rifles, and the more interesting sniper rifle. Aiming in the game is efforless as holding down the L trigger slaps reticules on all available targets, both hostile and the inanimate. Then, you can use the right thumb stick to pinpoint your desired target, or in the case of the sniper rifle, line up the scope for a fatal headshot. The ability to target inanimate objects strewn about in the levels serves your telekinesis well as you can pick up objects and throw them around, but no one is above popping a round into an explosive barrel conveniently located near a group of enemies (when will they ever learn to safely stash these things?) to watch the ensuing damage. Unfortunately, this sometimes creates some confusion as trying to pick out a single hostile in a room filled with boxes can make some work for your right thumb.

To break up the monotony of a straightforward shooter, the game often sees you operating as part of a team or a duo, and many missions are much more exciting for it. While the friendly AI is fairly simplistic, your teammates handle themselves well enough to not be a burden with the exceptions of a chaperon mission where protecting your friend is key to success.

As a shooter, Second Sight is fairly easy on both of the two available difficulty levels (normal and challenging). Not since Terminator have I seen anyone capable of sustaining so much damage, and Terminator is a killer robot of steel from the future! This questionable design decision can lead to some amusing moments when Vattic can close the distance between him and several enemies frantically pumping lead into his brain and the proceed to slap them down in succession. This surely negates the necessity for stealth in the game, right? Well, yes and no.

Early on in the game, you will learn how to stay out of trouble by navigating your environment unseen. The usual moves are all here, allow you to crouch, crawl through vents, hang from ledges and sneak up on your foes to grab them, although the latter doesn't work as well as it should and you will often end up alerting the guards while you try to get into the right spot to grab them. You can use objects for cover, and even lean around or over them to fire your weapons. You will also learn the value of stealth, as one false move will bring guards arunning and alarms ablaring. "Hang on!” I hear you exclaim, "Didn't you say I can easily dispatch enemies with my fists of fury?” Well, yes, until you realize that the guards will keep coming, and coming, and coming, until you wise up and stay out of sight and wait for the search order to cease. It is a cheap way to keep your urge to gun your way through the levels in check, but it's effective nonetheless. Fortunately, the stages are usually filled with lockers and compartments you can slip into and hide in, as long as none of the guards see you do it, in which case they will drag you out and call for more backup.

Most developers would have stopped there and pushed the game onto shelves, but not Free Radical, as I have yet to discuss the real star of the show, your psychic powers. Throughout the course of the game, you will discover/rediscover a handful of abilities that allow you to get through most of the stages without ever firing a gun. You have attack powers like Telekinesis that allows you to pick up objects and enemies and throw them around. Many of your more interesting powers aren't inherently aggressive, such as Charm, which, when used on enemies, alludes them to your presence for a short while. For a twist, if you use the same power on non-hostiles, you can calm them and get them to co-operate with you. Like Charm, most of your psychic powers have different uses, and some even have different tiers of effectiveness. A regular Psi Attack expels a deadly ball of psychic energy at a single enemy, but when you learn to master it later on, turns into a nova-like explosion that renders all foes in the vicinity unconscious or dead. Use of your psychic powers drain your power meter, but the meter refills itself quickly enough that you rarely have to worry about it running out, while not quick enough for you to become completely unstoppable.

As you can guess from my description, using your psychic powers are fun and offers some interesting alternative strategies to the gun-wielding approach. In fact, some stages require creative uses of your powers, such as when you will literally need to be in two places at the same time, or when you need to flip a switch in an area you cannot physically access. It is true that it will often be easier for you to stick to gunplay because it is just as effective and more straightforward, but doing so will rob you of much of the purpose of playing Second Sight.

All of these diverging gameplay elements are neatly tied together by a surprisingly coherent and interesting story that is told via two parallel timelines. While it was never involving enough to have my holding my breath for plot reveals, it's above and beyond the lengths to which most shooters have gone to tell a story.

As great as all the gameplay features sound, Second Sight is not without its share of flaws. This is a game that tries its hand at so many different things at once that none of it end up being exceptional. Most of the features implemented in the game have been done elsewhere, and often better. What this game can confidently boast, however, is that it does successfully combine the most interesting features of many action/stealth games into a single experience that makes most of its flaws very easy to overlook, with one exception – the enemy AI.

The artificial intelligence exhibited by your enemies in this game is pathetic. They operate competently within a limited capacity, such as they will take cover when shot at, and drag you out of a locker if they saw you entering your hideout, but outside of that, they behave like logs with brain damage. You can sometimes stand 3 meters away from them and they will go on chatting happily with each other, and they never come at you with enough co-ordination to pose as a real threat. This is one area that, if tightened up, would have propelled Second Sight easily into the must-play category as it would force you to use your abilities much more carefully and give players a sense of urgency and danger that is sorely missing from the game.

Not too much can be said about the presentation of Second Sight, except that everything looks and sounds quite ordinary, if not sub par. The character designs will be instantly recognized by those that played Free Radical's Timesplitters games, as they tend toward being slightly exaggerated and comic-inspired. The physics system in the game, while allowing you to break objects, knock them over or throw them around, doesn't quite emulate weight very well, and therefore detracts from the believability of some of your actions.