Beyond Good & Evil is a short but sweet ride.
Beyond Good & Evil is an action/adventure game where you play as Jade, a woman that wears all green, knows kung-fu, moonlights as a photographer, and is generally too cool for school. Your planet has been attacked by the evil DOMz, and is now under the protection of the Alpha Sections. However, all is not as it seems. Throughout the course of your adventure, you'll infiltrate some shady operations and expose the truth about what's going on. This takes the form of battling enemies, running hovercraft races, taking lots of photographs, and sneaking through heavily guarded bases.
The first thing that stands out about BGE is how great it looks. The game has a cool visual style. Ubisoft didn't go for a realistic look, but the world of Hillys is bright and colorful, with a variety of creatures roaming around. You'll be travelling via hovercraft, so the water was given a lot of love. It looks great. The characters are animated nicely and have a real personality all their own. There's also a lot of little details throughout. Jade runs a lighthouse, which is home to a lot of kids. You'll see crayon drawings on the wall, unmade beds, and toys lying around. Other places throughout the world have similar little details sprinkled throughout. They add up to a nice, believably lived-in world.
Beyond just looking good, BGE also has some terrific audio. All of the voice acting is done very well, especially Jade. She does a great job in showing real fear, pain, joy, and sadness as the plot moves on. This is also helped by the excellent animation done during the cutscenes. The soundtrack is nice and matches the mood of the places you visit.
There's a number of different things to do in this game, and they're all serviceable, but not great. You'll spend a lot of time moving across the water in your hovercraft. There's not a lot of variety to it, but you'll have to fight enemies, run some races, and outrun a fleet of baddies that are chasing you down. You'll also be spending a lot of time in first-person mode. Since Jade is a photographer, you'll be taking photos of all manner of things and using this view to shoot enemies and solving puzzles. The main sidequest involves cataloging all of Hillys' animals. I was amazed at the number of different animals that they included in this game. You'll have to be creative to get some of them, and the hunt for these creatures was always fun. I didn't like how much of a pain to get in and out of first-person mode quickly. During some of the boss battles this caused me to take some unneccessary damage. Fighting is really simplistic. Just jam on the attack button until the enemies died. Lastly, you'll be doing a lot of stealth in this game. I found it a bit boring and easy. The guards are really stupid, and seem to have a very hard time seeing things that are right in front of them. Basically, you just need to crouch and you'll be able to get around unseen.
Well, it would be that simple if the game's camera weren't so horrible. The camera in BGE is controlled with the right thumb stick, but it rarely does what you want it to do. I spent more time babysitting this camera than I did my last puppy. By the end of the game, I was so fed up with it that I just wanted to beat the last boss so I wouldn't ever have to fix the camera again.
It didn't take long for that wish to come true. BGE is short. It's very, very short. I completed everything there was to do in this game in 10 hours. And that's without using a cheat guide or anything. The puzzles were pretty easy, the world is pretty small, and the plot is pretty short. I didn't mind that this game was so short, because I was ready to put it down by the time that I got to the end.
Beyond Good & Evil is a great, bite-sized morsel of a game. There are some great moments in it, and I enjoyed playing it. However, it does wrap up before you know it, and the game does lose steam by the end. While there are a number of things to do, there's no real depth to any of them. This game was a treat, but I would only recommend picking it up for $10 or less.
