Beyond Good & Evil is about a young lady named Jade, who gets drawn into a resistance cell, which leads to her infiltrating the bases of the Alpha Section Intervention, who protect the planet from invasions from the DomZ, and uncovering their dark secrets. What's interesting is the focus of the game is not on combat. It's primarily a third-person view game, and the majority of the times you switch to first-person, you'll be holding a camera, rather than any sort of weapon. You sneak, you ambush, you crawl through pipes, you take incriminating photos. It's a lot like Thief in that regard, so you know I'd enjoy that. And in a lot of those sneaky times, you can not fight all at. If they see you, you'll have to start over, unless you can evade long enough for them to give up looking.But there's a lot more to it. You cruise the landscape in a hover boat, taking photographs of wildlife, after x amount of new organisms, you get a pearl. get enough pearls, you can buy ship upgrades. Then you can win hover boat races, announced by an annoying twerp who calls you "the little rookie" even when you're winning on the highest difficulty. There are secret locations where you'll have to chase pirates after they steal from you, as well.
And don't think this game is all about sneaking or boat-driving. If it comes to it, Jade knows how to kick some butt. She's got some sweet moves, especially with her staff in hand, and the controls are very smooth. Say you've been encircled by enemies, and you've succeeded in stunning one in front of you. If you pull back on the controller, Jade executes a series of backflips to bring in her close on a different opponent, and a well-timed button push will unleash a devastating kick of staff hit. Plus, you've got back-up. Part of the time it's your uncle, Pey'j, who's a humanoid pig with jet boots (weird family tree they've got). The rest of the time it's an agent of the resistance, who likes to headbutt things.What's kind of different is you rarely have missions that ask you to destroy/disable the places you sneak into. That's not what you, or the group you're working for are about. No, you just take pictures, and the group uses those pictures to raise public outcry against the Alphas. It feels very, French Revolution somehow, only with talking pigs, aliens, and fewer decapitations.
Beyond Good & Evil certainly isn't a long game, less than 20 hours, and there may not be a lot of replay to it, but it's certainly worth at least a one-time play, and you never know, once you've played it, when you might get the itch to break it out again.
7 comments:
This game is so utterly charming! I think I'll have to boot it up again and try to finish this time.
I was completely taken in by this game. It's so fantastically designed and just plain fun while being engrossing.
It's sort of like Legend of Zelda as filtered through French Sci-fi. There's even a bit of a foreshadowing ending that looks to not be capitalized on in a sequel, which is one of the biggest shames in gaming.
The press around this game reminds me of the press around Psychonauts which I haven't actually been able to get my hands on, but after playing this and realizing that it lives up to the hype of classic fun and good design, then I'm doing what I can to get Psychonauts - hopefully there's a Gamecube version I can pop into the Wii.
Jon Cormier: there was indeed a GameCube version.
I beat the game in maybe ten hours; its short length, I think, may have crippled its chances of success, despite the fact that it's tons of fun. I assume it was a rental for a lot of folks.
And it's a shame, since there's clearly a hell of a lot more story to tell as evidenced by the final image after the credits.
The producer's next game, Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie was also critically acclaimed but didn't sell real well, IIRC.
matthew: Ooh yes, finish it you must, oohhoohoo. Why am I talking like Yoda? It's not important, just play it again.
joncormier: My old roomie had Psychonauts on his PC, I recall it looked like a lot of fun. I should probably look into it, since it ought to be cheap on the Xbox by now.
So Beyond G&E has aspects of French sci-fi? Then I guess I need to look into some French sci-fi, then.
dan coyle: I would really like them to make a sequel, just because that world seemed like it'd be so much fun to explore. I suppose I'll have to become fabulously wealthy, so I can privately commission a sequel, right after I get an Anachronox sequel.
I weep for the world's lack of Anachronox Prime.
matthew: What?! They actually got to the point of naming the sequel? Oh man, that just depresses me even more!
Oh, cruel fate, why do you mock me?
Worse than that, Calvin, they had the entire plot and possibly a lot of the material already produced! The decision was made two-three years prior to release to snip Anachronox's plot into two as it was far too long for one game; quite a bit of work was meant to have been done on assets that would have gone into Prime, too, though the devs haven't confirmed that part. One forum rumour claims that 'the party goes out of the current universe, beyond the Echo Gate, and into all these weird domains that are embodiments of the various spheres of MysTech. Also, cool shit like the Echo Dimension (black and white pirate world) and Matrix 0 (called Roberg in earlier designs), the digital world. A lot of content was made earlier on that would have gone into Prime, but a lot of it was cut or shoehorned into the existing game (during Samoht and Nevets' magic show in the Red Light district, one of them turns the other into a creature from one of the domains, Magentasse I believe)'.
So, yes. Weep and lament for what once was, and could have been.
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