Beyond Good & Evil™

It's definitely a hidden gem. However Ubisoft already took down the Steam Storpage and Xbox Store for the upcoming remaster. So get it while you still can. We saw what happen with the GTA Trilogy.

Not having played this when originally released, I went in based on the glowing memories of critics and others. So what does this newbie find? Horrible controls. Horrible camera. Horrible combat. I gave up on this game about 2/3rds of the way through because I was tired of guessing how the camera was going to change during the middle of a section. I got frustrated trying to aim my strikes during combat as the camera would change angle constantly, especially in close quarters, and stealth sections were sometimes made more difficult due to a camera shift partway through that was unexpected. On the good side, the cartoonish nature of the world makes the graphics acceptable; I never thought it looked bad. The story seemed okay, so as long as you are willing to deal with the camera/control issues, it would be worth a playthrough.

So I had some money to spend, and decided I wanted another game from this site. After some looking around I saw this game and remembered reading on some magazines and this site about how it's an amazing game that only has the flaw of not selling for some unknown reason, so I decided to spend the $10 USD and give it a try. Keep in mind that I was running this game on a Windows 7 64-bit machine, AMD processor and ATI graphics, with custom controls (EDSF for movement instead of WASD, among other things). So some of the game-running problems I had might have been associated with these settings. The game is beautiful, with an enjoyable storyline and characters that brought a smile to my face more than once. Combat runs fairly smooth, and the stealth sections were well designed. I spent some extra time doing the races and hunting for creatures to take pictures of and enjoying myself doing so. That said however, there were some horrible issues I had playing the game, that I had to take a star off, tempted to take two off for them: -Camera: The actual one, not the one in game, control of it gets taken away from the player more than a few times, sometimes leaving you disoriented. Other times you have *some* control over it, but can only look straight up/straight down. I often found myself activating the camera in-game to go into 1st person view so I can actually see what I needed to look at at the time. -Combat: Runs smoothly and goes pretty well, unless you need to dodge, Jade only dodges the way you want her to some of the time, and even then it's only a step or so, most of the time I just stopped attacking and moved out of the way or just took the hit instead of trying to dodge it. --Hovercraft controls (minor): The controls of the main vehicle of the game are in relation to the camera, so when you lose control of the camera, you lose control of the craft. thankfully they brought in a second 1st person view where you can steer and shoot the cannon without trouble, and used that more often than not. --Run/Turbo (minor)To run or use the faster hovercraft engines, you sometimes have to hold down the run button, other times it's toggleable (tap once to activate, tap again to stop) --End boss(minor/personal):To avoid spoilers, most of the end boss fight is fun, however at the end he attacks in a pattern, if he hits you even once during this pattern he resets the pattern, which wouldn't have been too horrible except going through the entire pattern is the only way to kill him. No matter how many healing items you have stored up, or how many times you hit him, if you fail to go through the entirety of the pattern, you might as well not even bother trying to kill him. ---Graphics(Minor/fixable): Textures and particles tend to go spaztic on modern computers, leading to headaches. turning off HW Vertex Processing or anti-aliasing will fix this, took a bit of google searching for me to figure this out. All in all, a good game and well worth the price here, just a few things about it that caused unnecessary frustration and wasn't particularly fond of the after-credits ending.

I envy those who played this back in the day..... but...When will I learn? Reviews that say 'game from my childhood' should not be counted in my personal appraisal of whether I should buy a game (but this is my issue, no one else's, what follows is a guide for those who want to know if they should buy it). This is the first time I played the game, and make no mistake, for its day, it was a very very good game, I can tell even after all these years. The problem is that the PC port is imperfect (camera behaves itself about 70% of the time, so annoying but not a deal-breaker). But the main gameplay loop is basic stealth which gets old, very fast. I got 7 hours in, so I estimate over half way, but then I just saw room after room of frustration (don't get me wrong, the stealth isn't 'bad' but it's simplistic enough that the easy rooms are boring, and the harder ones become frustrating). Technically, took some tinkering to avoid visual glitches or slowdowns and sound eventually kept playing up. Not the fault of the game, but it did impact my experience. I think the story/characters would have been perfect for 12 year old me, they're good, but a little light in writing. Summary: If you don't know/like games of this style from this era, probably don't jump in here. If you do, definitely give it a shot. Worthy of the 'classic' title, if a little dated.

Along with Psychonauts, this is one of the best 3D action-adventure games. It has varied gameplay, memorable characters, a fantastic world to explore, enjoyable and well integrated mini-games. However, on the PC this game is an exercise in frustration. You will be fighting the camera, cursing the controls, wishing for a quicksave feature and running into bugs and glitches such as the sound being out of sync. This is why I can not in good conscience give the PC version more than three stars.