Beyond Good & Evil (PC)

A game ported over from the consoles, Beyond Good and Evil is an excellent action-adventure game that also entails a good dollop of stealth. You play as a young woman called Jade, a photographer struggling to get by and housing a group of orphans in a lighthouse on the planet Hillys. The planet is at great danger from the threat of an alien race known as the Domz, and are protected by a military group called The Alpha Section. The game puts you right into the thick of the action as a Domz attack threatens the lighthouse, with the shields failing due to late payments to the supplier.

After an initial battle for survival, you get your first assignment photographing animals, meet up with your uncle Pey'j (an anthropoid pig, but because of the surreal nature of the game this doesn't seem at all odd...), and find out what on earth is going on. The storyline is simple but highly immersive because of the characters and style of the game. The graphics are superb (it may take a bit of meddling with the advanced settings to get them to display properly though) and create a wonderfully surreal but believable environment. The ambient sound effects are terrific too. Although this is a DVD-ROM game, many conversations in the game are simply shown as text, though of course the cut scenes are fully voiced. The voice acting throughout the game is top notch, among the best and most convincing I've ever heard . The music too is brilliant and not only atmospheric, but also exhibiting influence of West Indian, Latin American, Oriental and other styles appropriate your location in the game world. (Even though you're not on planet earth... for some reason having rhinoceros people who sound like Jamaicans seems perfectly natural!)

What makes this such a pleasure to play though is the great level design. There are a good variety of puzzles to be solved requiring the use of different skills - some quite easy, some challenging. The game overall isn't particularly hard - it took me 17 hours to complete, which is one reason why I didn't feel it quite deserved 5 stars. However only two or three parts got to the stage of being frustratingly difficult (and were ultimately overcome - giving me a great feeling of accomplishment!). There are surprisingly few definite variations of things within the game - combat is either hand-to-hand, with a stick (yeah it has some cool martial arts name, but it still looks like a stick), and a disc shooter attached to your camera. You travel on foot, in a hovercraft or finally by spaceship. Each aspect of the game is so well put together though that it doesn't feel in the slightest bit limited. There are also various objects to be collected that can enhance your abilities and sub-quests to keep you busy.

The stealth part of the game is superbly implemented. It's often not immediately apparent what tactics you will need to employ to get past a certain challenge - stealth, attack, or stealthy attack are basically your options but you definitely need to employ your brain as well as reflexes to progress through the game. A gung-ho attitude might work for some sections but you'll never come close to completing the game without being able to use a more subtle approach at times.

This would have been a good action adventure anyway, but the addition of the photography aspect really adds to this game. Not only is it useful to be able to safely zoom in on future obstacles at some points, but the challenge is that much greater when you don't just need to bash a creature (only because they deserve it!), but also get a decent photograph of them too. To give you incentive to get to particular points in the game you often need to photograph a particular thing. Once you've got a decent way into the game your photos are needed as evidence against the corrupt authorities.

Apart from Jade and Pey'j, we also meet a special agent called Double-H. He's very funny and the three characters together are among the most memorable in computer came history. The style of the game is amazing, too - the action scenes are very intense and the emotional scenes could come close to bringing tears to the eyes of the most hardened games player. It's so slick that I doubt Hollywood could offer anything more impressive in terms of production values. Though it's fully 3D, the game strikes me as having the style of an anime - think Howl's Moving Castle / converted into a computer game and you might have an idea of what I mean.

When first released, Beyond Good and Evil didn't sell very well due to bad timing - some very hyped and anticipated games came out around the same time. This lead to it being dubbed "the best game no-one ever played" - an exaggeration perhaps, but unfortunately this seems to have made a sequel less likely (though there have still been rumours). The game was very enjoyable and I would love a sequel to come out, especially as I want to see what happens to the Jade character. One of my few grumbles about the game is that, just as her character's background is starting to get really interesting, the game ends (and if you watch the end credits all the way to the very last scene, you will see a very clear set-up for a sequel). The unfinished storyline element isn't quite as bad as that in KOTOR 2, but it's still a bit frustrating. Quite apart from that though, if they managed to create a sequel with the same style of game play (and preferably a bit longer), I think pretty much anyone who's played this first game would love to get it. There were a couple of minor issues with dialogue continuity and graphical inconsistencies, and occasionally the keyboard controls felt slightly cumbersome, but the game was so involving and enjoyable that these never became serious issues.

If you have any trouble with the graphics, check the readme file. It contains some useful information on the advanced graphics options, though even then it's a case of trial and error to see what works best for your system. Also in the setup program check that the proper driver for your sound cards is being used, by chance I happened to notice that it was set to a generic driver an when I changed it there was quite a difference in the sound quality.

Minimum System Requirements

OS: Windows Me / 2000 / XP / x64 (and seemed happy enough in Vista)
CPU: Pentium III 700MHz or equivalent
Memory: 128Mb
Graphics: 32Mb DirectX 9.0b compatible
DVD-ROM drive (x2 speed)

Although I have completed the game, there were one or two things I didn't manage to do along the way so I may well revisit the game at some point.

Age rating: 7+ (Some fairly intense action sequences but no gore)

Availability

Amazon and Play.com both have the "Revival" labelled re-release for just a fiver (minus one or two pence). Though the game is a little shorter than I'd have liked, this is still a steal for such an enjoyable game.