What about the combat though - the main core of the gameplay experience? Well, the Obscure combat system is very weak and needs some improvement pretty badly. Like a standard survival horror with melee weapons, hold the R1 button to ready your bat, golf club or whatever you have then tap the X button to swing. While attacking with a melee weapon, your character will swing at the enemy with a choppy looking quick combination of strikes that are devoid of any interesting sound effects. It's actually hard to tell when your character is hitting an enemy since there is little indication of a successful hit while attacking on both sides (the enemy and player) mainly due to the absence of noticeable sound effects. While you attack, all of sudden, either the enemy will die or your character will start to lose health rapidly because the enemy is owning you so badly, making you rush to the item menu for some health items. Some of the enemies in Obscure can get quite rowdy with their attacks, so you'll be using health items quite a bit at times.
Firearms are slightly better choices of attack. The aiming looks comfortable on screen, but once you actually start shooting, much like with melee weapons, it is hard to tell when you are actually hitting an enemy because all you can see it a slight blood splatter that will signal a successful hit. Firearms are a much safer way to take down enemies, but it begins to feel like you're wasting bullets at times since it is hard to tell if you are hitting the enemy or not. I found it best to give my firearms to my CPU partner since she was more accurate; this way I could run up and hit the enemies while my CPU partner didn't clumsily get caught up in attacks with me - nothing like having to heal both characters. I actually dreaded getting into fights in this game because I started to understand what each fight would lead to - more uses of valuable health items because of cheap enemy hits and an overall bad combat system.
Save points are not really few and far between but once a save point is used, it cannot be used again, so if you die then you'll be forced to backtrack through obstacles and redo some puzzles in order to get back to where you were in some cases. As already mentioned, the combat system will cause you to use up a bunch of health items at times, especially since you will be controlling two characters and neither one can die. When control is switched to one set of characters then switched back to another already used set, the health of the already used characters will remain the same as it was before you switched, still forcing you to heal if necessary.
The character models in Obscure look pleasing but they still don't stand up too well to the more recent third person PS2 games that have been released. As already mentioned, environments are usually well done. Enemies mainly consist of zombie-like plant creatures. The FMVs during cutscene look very well done.
The controls are much like a standard survival horror game when it comes to movement. Characters move easily in the direction that is held. Hold the direction lightly to walk or with more force to run. Weapons can be mapped to different D-pad directions for quick weapon changing during combat. Aiming with firearms sometimes isn't accurate and may cause you to use up ammo pretty quickly.
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