The two games really aren't that much alike. Psi-Ops is a balls-to-the-wall action game that is, essentially, about telekinetically throwing some poor bastard into horrible death machines; Second Sight is split evenly between psychological thriller, high adventure, fast-paced gunplay, and weird conspiracies.

When Second Sight begins, a bald man is strapped to a bed somewhere in New England. In order, he finds out that he can't remember anything; he's apparently been shot a few times; the guards think he's a psychotic killer; he's telekinetic; the guards are shooting to kill; he looks quite a bit like a shaved Gordon Freeman; and his name is John Vattic.

Second Sight takes place in the past and present simultaneously. In the present, Vattic has to evade the NSA and whoever else is after him while searching for clues to his identity and his past, while in the past, Vattic and the special forces unit fight through Russian soldiers in Siberia.

In either version, Second Sight is a third-person shooter, heavy on the adventure and stealth elements, light on the serious gunplay. It emphasizes cover and concealment at all times; Vattic's hard to kill, but five guys with rifles will do the trick. Most of the time, you're encouraged to step softly, eliminating single opponents with tranquilizer darts to the back of the head or a quick pistol-whipping. Otherwise, one of them might call an alert in, and then you'll be up to your ears in annoyed security guards.

Of course, you can also throw people off of tall buildings or knock them a couple of hundred feet with a powerful blast of psychic force. This isn't all hippie crap.

In the past scenario, Vattic's just one member of a crew of seven soldiers. He doesn't have any powers, so you need to be even more careful. Fortunately, he can hug walls, peek around corners, edge open doors, duck into air vents, and do a few other things straight out of the stealth-action hero playbook... or he can open up on a roomful of people with an AK-47. It really depends on how you feel at the moment.

The real reason to progress through each level is to figure out how the story's going to turn out. Second Sight's plotline is fairly straightforward; find out what the hell happened to Vattic in Siberia. The twists and turns along the way are occasionally predictable (there's a twist near the end of the third stage in the past that's barely a twist at all), but they're delivered by a great cast of voice actors with some outstanding dialogue and, perhaps most importantly, some really evocative work with the character models.

Second Sight's cast boasts some of the most expressive faces I've ever seen on a video game character; they're slightly oversized and cartoony, and Vattic boasts strange flapping boat-hands that could palm a medicine ball, but it really helps to communicate what they're thinking and saying at any given moment. You can see anger, fear, amusement, glee, and being real dead flit across their faces clearly and evocatively.

It's a shame that Psi-Ops came out before Second Sight, because now Second Sight has to play catch-up. It's the superior game in many ways; it's smarter, funnier, faster, and more varied. In a perfect world, it wouldn't be mentioned at the same time as Psi-Ops; they're two wildly dissimilar games linked tenuously by similar subject matter.