Beyond Good & Evil

"For kids only, and only in the event aliens steal every last Dr. Seuss book on Earth."

I stopped playing racing games a long time ago, mostly because there's only so many ways you can freshen up the "go from x to y in z seconds" formula that don't involve billion-dollar R&D investments from multinational conglomerates. Same thing with sports games. And now, after finishing Beyond Good & Evil, I am forced to make a new rule of thumb:

No more games featuring a major character that could be faithfully portrayed in a Disney World ride.

Nothing personal, it's just that these games put a serious crimp into my naked female appreciation time.

Enter...a world of fantasy. Or, not.

The game takes place in and around the planet Hillys, which looks like a cross between The Phantom Menace and a commercial for Ireland. You play the photographer Jade, who cares for several orphans inside a lighthouse along with her half-human, half-pig, Southern-fried uncle Pey'j. (What's his family tree look like? Is Piggsy from Manhunt in there?) With her exotic features, green lipstick and headband, tomboy haircut, a cool-assed pair of jeans, and a magic stick that she uses to thwap the hell out of anything threatening her, Jade is clearly Ubisoft's attempt at an anti-Lara Croft. To create a 21st-century heroine, to attract a new generation of girls to gaming, to transcend the female stereotypes so prevalent not only in video games, but in life.

So of course the game opens with her lighthouse being attacked by aliens, because she didn't pay her energy bill.

Good one, Ubisoft.

Anyhow, you're thrown into the fray right off the bat. These aliens, known as the DomZ, are floating bony wraiths that have been abducting the people of Hillys for years. You start with your basic three-hit combo, a multi-hit combo, a charge-up attack, a dodge button, a run button, and a stun attack from your "partner," if any. Once the DomZ are driven off, your basic goal is to raise some dough by traveling around Hillys in your hovercraft and photographing the planet's various and sundry species. Additionally, you gain a pearl with every ten new species you photograph, pearls being the means by which you buy the hovercraft upgrades needed to truly advance in the game (turbo jets for jumping over obstacles, a cannon for gunning down machines that block your path, etc.) In the course of acquiring all this loot, you'll discover that the Alpha Section - the army charged with defending Hillys against the DomZ - is not what it appears to be. Sure, their members look decent enough, with their menacing faceless black armor and constant pro-war propaganda, but...

Along with your camera and your stick, you also carry a S.A.C., a canteen-sized item that can digitize your entire inventory into portable format. It also houses Secundo, a holographic Hispanic metrosexual, and no, you don't want to know. The S.A.C. is a nice gimmick, but if you're wondering why you can't use it to digitize away the various annoying obstacles blocking your path, or maybe even why a society capable of effortlessly converting matter to digital information and vice versa needs vats to grow food in, or mines, or money, or...all right, I'll get on with it.

Now, I agree with Beyond's fans: it looks and sounds great. Not quite cel-shaded, but not "realistic" either, the graphics are fluid and vividly colored. Once in a while - such as the luminescent plants that grow deep within the Hillyan mines - they're flat-out gorgeous. The soundtrack that juggles pianos, orchestral motifs, choirs, exotic wind instruments, synthesizers, and 909 beats with playful ease. The psyche music gets you psyched without beating you over the head.

What those fans didn't tell me is that Beyond Good & Evil is...a kid's game. To elaborate:

The combat is too easy and too boring.

The puzzles are too easy and too boring.

The story is insipid.

Combat. (Zzzzzzz...three hit combo...zzzzzzz...)

By and large, you only go into combat when you encounter a homicidal creature deep within Hillys' mines, or inside the Alpha's strongholds. But just because you fight infrequently in this game doesn't mean it had to feel like an afterthought, or that your opponents had to be such wussies. Once you've gotten the discus (which is essentially a politically-correct sniper rifle) roughly one-third of the way through, and bought the useless charge attack power-up, you've seen all that there is to see in the way of combat. And your targets don't do much more than sit in front of you and wait to be swatted into oblivion. The Alpha soldiers are a little tricky - if you decide to take them on, you have to either counterattack them or have your partner stun them. If. Ninety percent of the time you won't have to fight them in the first place (more later). Oh, and once in a while you have to shoot down a flying serpent in your hovercraft. That's pretty much it.

Remember back in The Legend of Zelda when you were locked a room with five or six Darknuts that were invulnerable from the front, and you had to get close enough to each one to attack them from their flank or rear without exposing yourself to the other Darknuts? You won't find anything as convoluted in Beyond until the game's very last fight.

The puzzles. (Click that switch!)

The puzzle-to-combat ratio is roughly three-to-one. You have your regular puzzles: Jump that moving laser beam! Roll under that one! Click that switch! Have your partner move that crate for you! Knock some explosives into a ramp to lower it! Nothing too stimulating.

Then you have your "stealth" puzzles, where you must avoid being spotted by the Alpha guards. The Alpha guards make the Genome Soldiers look like the Delta Force - just figure out the blindingly obvious pattern, and either crawl past them or disable them by shooting the gas tanks they carry on their backs. Because, of course, if you're a soldier that needs to breathe some exotic gas to stay alive, the best place to carry it is in a fragile container on your back where any idiot can disable it. If you're spotted, you can sit inside the conveniently placed hiding areas for a minute or two, and the situation will reset to zero. Or you can beat them up - just wait for them to lunge at you, and then counterattack. Later the designers try to inject some challenge into the stealth areas...by abruptly moving from "getting spotted results in a mildly difficult fight" to "getting spotted results in instant death via laser beam, even if you're behind a wall." It goes over about as well as Ethel Merman's disco album.

The story(?)

Beyond Good & Evil was created by a French production team led by Michel Ancel, and in the credits there are French, Spanish, English, Dutch, Italian, and German VO casts listed. Maybe in the original French this was some brilliant satire of American conformity interspersed with witty soliloquies about the conflicts between quantum mechanics, evolutionary psychology, and free will. In English, it's warmed-over Disney, where the occasional off-color joke seems like a small miracle. (Pey'j wears jet boots powered by "compressed methane"; you can guess the source.) Once Pey'j exits the stage, you're treated to a series of increasingly lame plot twists, and the final half-hour expends every last shameless video game cliche - You Are The Chosen One (With Special Powers), Only You Can Save Your Planet, He's Dead...Wait, He's Alive!, Let's Rip Off Steven King's It, To Make Things Difficult We're Reversing Your Controls, The End(?), and my favorite, It Was Part Of Our Plan All Along. Somebody even gets to say, "It's a trap!" at the appropriate moment. No, it's not Admiral Ackbar.

Some have compared Beyond to Grand Theft Auto III. Allow me to shoot this comparison down just like the ground turrets will shoot you down if you attempt venture outside the constricted play area. You're only allowed to attack a subset of what you find in Hillys, and pedestrians and small animals are emphatically not on that list. Yes, there are optional races, areas, and minigames where you can earn extra cash and pearls. No, they're not worth the trouble, since there's just not that much to buy. Yes, you can fly around in outer space, but it's just like the rest of the game: nice to look at, but there's not much to do.

...

The only question left is Beyond's continuing reputation as some sort of under-appreciated masterpiece and/or the next Zelda. Beyond Good & Evil was touted as the Next Big Thing in gaming, but it was little more than Ubisoft's bid at becoming the Disney of video games. Someone should have at least mentioned to Ubisoft that Disney's original in-house movie studio has all but evaporated over the past five years. The game's grandiose title sports the most outrageous false advertising since The NeverEnding Story; good and evil can be spotted a mile away, evil's once again pissing off good, and good, bloody but unbowed, triumphs in the end.

That is, until you trade the game in for that Dead Or Alive volleyball thing.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/05