Last year Kronos and Eidos Interactive came out of nowhere with Fear Effect, a mature, violent PlayStation adventure that created a surreal and immersive world with its great plot and use of FMV backgrounds. Not one to sit on their laurels (this is the publisher of Tomb Raider we're talking about here), we now have Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix here, not a year after the original. Actually a prequel to Fear Effect, the difference between Fear Effect and Tomb Raider is that with the sequel, Kronos has gone and improved upon the faults of the original and produced another mind trip of an adventure through a future where the quest for everlasting life can have dire consequences.

There haven't been many significant changes to the overall working of things in Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix; they've merely been refined and touched up. The main characters this time around are Hana and Rain, although the characters from the first game (Royce Glas and Jakob "Deke" Decourt) do show up eventually in order to explain how the group came together for their mission. The dynamic duo work with each other on an assignment that sends them spiraling into a world of unexpected danger. Their original goal was to steal strands of DNA from a top-secret laboratory hosting a luxurious party for the man who claims to have discovered the gene that ends each of our lives. And yes, Hana and Rain do find themselves having a little fun with each other at one point, but it's brief - don't get your hopes up.

Being a huge fan of Fear Effect, there were a few changes that I was hoping Kronos would find their way into the sequel, and for the most part, I'm pleased. For one, there was a quirk in Fear Effect where if you held down the roll button, you became invincible in the game; enemies were unable to hit you when rolling. In Retro Helix, this doesn't work, and this bodes well to makes the game more of a challenge, which is definitely a good thing, since there's the issue of the game's length. Secondly, the FMV backgrounds look excellent, but because of hardware limitations on the PlayStation, the actual animations are only a few seconds long. Retro Helix doesn't do as well in this area; the actual skipping of the animation isn't as bad as before, but there are now times where when you approach the edge of a screen, the animations will completely stop, or disappear entirely (leaving only the non-animated portion of the backgrounds there)!

As mentioned, it's amazing how talented the team at Kronos has become when it comes to creating detailed pre-rendered backdrops; the environments for Retro Helix fit the style of the game perfectly. The times when there aren't complete animations eliminating that feel of static that plagues similar titles there are subtle touches, like water dripping from a pipe or Christmas lights sparkling near and far. A great plus is that there's really no time where there's any feeling of repetition in the environments, even more impressive when the game is in otherwise decidedly boring areas like a series of underground pipes. The fact that Retro Helix is a great playing game is only complimented by the visual appeal of the title, and if this is what Kronos can do with an aging PlayStation, it scares us to think about what Fear Effect 3 could be like on a next-generation machine.

The action in Retro Helix is intense and often occurring, but that's not all there is to the game: there are the puzzles. Even as I write this I'm starting to build up a headache thinking about a few of the game's brain busters. Normally, I have a high tolerance for dealing with puzzles, no matter how abstract they seem to be. Like Fear Effect, however, Retro Helix has an assortment of puzzles that will do one of two things: poke at your brain mass and actually make it work or make the frustration muscle burst into a flurry of destroyed tissue. When the solution becomes clear (or you look in a walkthrough), the answers to a few of the more odd puzzles seems simple enough, but it has more to do with the game not explaining how you're supposed to solve the puzzles than it does with the puzzles themselves. Many times there will be "hints" on computer monitors through the game or graphs that are hanging up on the wall. More often than not, they are placed in spots where you otherwise wouldn't think a hint for a puzzle would be hidden (in Fear Effect, for example, it was an animation on a TV). Sometimes it comes down to plain old guess and check work to solve a few of them because trying to figure out the "environment hints" is too much work.

While the romp through the future isn't an especially long one, Retro Helix is a blast from start to finish, and it's even the smaller details that make the experience all the more enjoyable. Kronos has eliminated any load time between dying and loading up a saved game, which is a great help in the areas where it takes multiple attempts to figure out the pattern and the like. Then there's the "Hard" mode difficulty for gamers wanting to give the game another go, where instead of merely decreasing the amount of ammunition and upping the health of the enemies, Kronos went and changed the puzzles in the game to make them even tougher than before.

There is plenty of room for Kronos to expand their new star series, and it's my hope that they don't start running out of steam because Eidos Interactive wants to bring out more sequels to capitalize on the game's success. Retro Helix is a fantastic game, better than its predecessor and one of the last must own games for PlayStation owners.