Beyond Good & Evil

The fact that my PC is getting more and more decrepit has certain advantages, namely that I find myself playing more obscure games from a few years back that I probably wouldn't have considered when they came out. After much searching I finally tracked down a copy of Michel Ancel's Beyond Good & Evil gathering dust in my local PC World. I'd heard a lot about the game, it was often mentioned as being something of a neglected classic.

Having now played the game, I can see why it's regarded so highly but sold so poorly. It's not a great game, it doesn't really do anything that original and it certainly feels a bit too short. But when it comes together, somehow it works very well.

Being a PC-based gamer, I'm not used to games being actually fun. They're usual morose, sombre pieces with oppression and darkness being the order of the day. But BG&E is permeated with a light, cartoony atmosphere, and even when it does become more heavy it's still good fun. It reminded me of my Dreamcast days (am I sounding elderly yet?), of games like Shenmue and Jet Set Radio and Rez, which proved that games don't always have to be about fighting off alien invasions, and that if the universe of the game is good enough then it doesn't matter if the game plays poorly.

But BG&E is about an alien invasion. It's about a planet under the control of an oppressive alien regime (HL2 came a year later by the way), and it's up to our cunning reporter Jade to un-oppress the regime. There's a few fairly predictable plot twists, a couple of rather incompetent sidekicks (HL2 again) and a lot of subgames, which range from actually quite good to fairly infuriating.

If there are good things about the game it's that it moves pretty fast and doesn't ever get too boring, and it looks fairly pretty, even by today's standards. But it feels like it's borrowing too heavily from other games, the hovercraft races (have I mentioned HL2 yet?) seem to be a merely modified version of Pod Racer on the N64, the shooty bits resemble the aforementioned Rez, and the runny adventure bits (it's not a game about diarrhoea) are so generically platformery that I can't even begin to list the games it resembles. But it's all done with enough verve to just about carry it off.

At the end of the day, BG&E is a console game on the PC, which is precisely what it is, obviously. Never too deep or challenging, in many ways it feels like the last of a species of fun, accessible console games about to made extinct under a meteor of franchises, ultra-real FPSs and online RPGs.

Labels: Review

posted by Henry @ 2:15 pm