Gamer's Diary: Beyond Good and Evil
By BrontoThunder 1 Comments
I recently purchased a game that has been on my radar for quite some time now; Beyond Good and Evil. Whilst all I've heard from the game has been positive I never bothered to look too far into acquiring it until it appeared under the "games cheaper than $10" section of the Steam Store. After the hour or so it took to download the 2.2 gigabytes of files required to play the game on my PC I delved into the cult classic and here - three hours later - here are my thoughts so far...
I was instantly disappointed by the lack of controller compatibility as I have recently come across an Xbox 360 controller for my PC and I'm not much of a fan of using a keyboard and mouse to play games viewed in the third-person perspective, although if I could play through Batman: Arkham Asylum purely with my keyboard and mouse I could tolerate this. I selected the "New Game" option which triggered a 3 minute pre-rendered sequence involving the protagonist of the game, Jade. The moment the movie switched to a game is when I was hit with a number of graphical glitches and floating three-dimensional artefacts and since one can not change the video settings in game, rather the Settings Application I had to quit the game and fiddle around with the various drop-down lists and check the Steam forums regarding the various glitches the game has when played on any PC more powerful than the original X-Box. That was now all behind me and after half an hour of having the game installed on my computer I was now able to play it.
To be honest, I'm quite a snob when it comes to games and an experience the likes of which I just had would usually sour my entire time with most games, however Beyond Good and Evil had such instantaneous and undeniable charm that I felt obliged to forget the technical troubles and lead Jade and her friend Pey'j along their quest. I really didn't know what to expect when it came to the gameplay of Beyond Good and Evil other than something along the lines of "Stealth-based action adventure" and I was pleasantly surprised when what I got was a strange mix of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Pokemon Snap. You control Jade from the third-person perspective and at any time you are able to press Shift which causes the game to switch to a first-person camera view with which you can photograph and document the various fauna found in the game (150 to be precise, much like one of the two aforementioned games) or take snapshots of bad guys doing bad things. I always believed Pokemon Snap would have been infinitely better had it been an open-world (or at the very least NOT on-rails) game in which you photograph various Pokemon so the clever blend of this aspect of gameplay in addition to arguably one of the greatest games to have been made in Ocarina of Time and we have a winning formula, right? Ehh..
So far I have noticed one striking flaw with the game (aside from the technical issues) and that is the horrible controls. The mouse-based camera movement is the safest bet when it comes to any third-person game on a PC but Beyond Good and Evil does it so much worse than most others in the genre; moving the mouse forwards and backwards results in the camera moving directly up and down on the Y-Axis which is extremely counter-intuitive, especially compared to the regular format of the camera moving around a single point (usually the main character's head). This isn't such an issue when driving around the world on Jade's hovercraft or just walking around the cities but it is crippling during the moments where the gameplay switches to a stealth-style and timing and accuracy of Jade's movements are key to survival and success. I found that at one point I needed to crouch to pass a number of guards and the camera did not reach any higher than Jade's shoulders which severely limited my line of sight and caused me to have to restart that section of the level a number of times.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to put up with the controls, camera and UI long enough to play through the storyline of the game - I hope I do, for the sake of all the critical acclaim and fandom Beyond Good and Evil has attained.
- Robosaur
Still playing: Beyond Good and Evil.