Beyond Good & Evil

"Excellent art direction... and that's about it"

I held off buying this game when it first came out, and now I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it. My expectations were high, based both on the reviews in magazines and on the screenshots I'd seen, but I was severely disappointed.

Graphics: 10/10. This is the one area where the game shines. It's very pretty, and not merely in the sense of utilizing technology well--rather, it has been put together by truly inspired artists. Jade looks unlike any videogame heroine you've ever seen before, and yet she's so beautiful. But many other characters look great, too: Pey'J the pig is roly-poly and adorable, even as he is brash; HH is the classic jock, down to the chin and forehead; and one incidental character, a bright blue catwoman (Felis Sapiens) really amazed me. The environments also look good, with nice color coordinations and a good level of detail, although frankly other games out there have environments that look just as good.

Sound: 8/10. The music is nice, the sound effects are nice, and much of the voice acting is very good. Pey'J and HH in particular have well-done voices. Jade doesn't talk very much. The lady at the science center sounds like a robot. A robot that can't act.

Gameplay: 5/10. There are two serious problems with the gameplay. The one is that it's entirely context-sensitive, meaning that most of the time you can't do anything but run around. There isn't even a persistent attack, roll, or jump button. I realize that this is a matter of taste, but I like my games to feel interactive. I like to know that I can jump around or swing my stick just because I feel like it--whether it's useful at the moment or not. Fighting consists of alternating between the attack button and the duck button until you fall asleep, the enemies are all dead, or both (why on earth has this game been compared to Zelda, which has always had very varied and interesting combat?).

The second serious problem with gameplay is that the menu interface is both tedious AND shallow. You have to hold down the analog stick while you scroll through objects arranged in a circle. And the irony is, Jade doesn't even have a meaningful inventory. Almost all the items she can pick up are lock-and-key devices such as keycards or tickets, and they are automatically selected when you approach the appropriate object. The only persistent inventory items that you can actually use whenever you want are health-restoring objects (Starkos and K-Bups).

I like the photography play, but it really isn't as interesting as it could have been.

Story. 1/10. The story was the major draw for many people, and partly for me, as well. So I was very dismayed to find that it isn't interesting _at_all_. The writing itself is fine--the dialogs are nice and snappy--but plot is completely generic sci-fi, and it feels totally mailed in. It's very lacking in details, and it doesn't even have a twist at any point. It's the most bewilderingly straightforward conspiracy yarn I've ever encountered. Furthermore, although the characters, as noted above, are very engaging visually, they do not actually have personalities. Any intro writing course will tell you that characters need to have conscious goals, subconscious motivations, fatal flaws, etc--but the writers of this game seem not to have been aware of this. No tensions develop between the characters.

Overall, this game was very disappointing for me, especially since the gaming press seems to have loved it so much (check the reviews). The totally context-sensitive controls give it the feeling of a mid-90s point-and-click PC adventure. Why did we play those games, anyway? Oh yeah--for the story! How can a game succeed without either gameplay OR story? I won't insist on the game's short length; that would be fine, if the game were actually entertaining.

One final word on the programming. Since this is a multiplatform title, I don't know how clean the GC, PC, or XBox versions are... but the PS2 has very serious bugs. In just a few hours of gameplay, I have encountered two. Once, the second boss disappeared on me, forcing me to load; and another time, I got stuck in a doorway while escorting the wounded HH to the Akuda Bar and was forced to wait until he died (since the game won't let you access menus while going through doorways). I have to say, I have worked in QA, and if my company ever shipped a game with two game-stopping bugs like that we would all have been fired.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 04/01/05