Flashback: The Quest for Identity

The Good
Flashback: The Quest for Identity (1994) is a fast paced game that brilliantly combines the fast paced, action elements of a traditional side-scrolling, platformer with the more intellectual elements of an adventure game. Its superior graphics, character animation and tight game play similar to "Out of the World", without the bitterly high difficulty level. Movie buffs will note some homages to cult class films such as 'Total Recall', 'They Live' and 'Phantasm II'. In the distant future, our hero has discovered that a race of space aliens have been impersonating humans! Before he can go public with this information, his space ship is shot down over a tropical jungle, causing him to crash land and lose his memory.

The Bad
The lack of a hardware upgrade for the Sega CD forced many of its games to offer only slight improvements from their cartridge based counterparts. If you played the Genesis version you will notice no differences in the graphics or game play. Instead, the CD version features better music, more character animation and improved CGI sequences. Along with different passwords, the only addition to the cartridge version is decent voice acting to go alongside the text based conversations.

The Bottom Line
Flashback: The Quest for Identity (1994) is a difficult game to judge. In comparison to the Genesis version, the extra features are nice, but do not drastically improve the game. However, if you judge the game on its own, it is one of the best single player, action, adventure titles for the Sega CD.