Beyond Good & Evil™

This was a hit and miss game for me. The meat of the story was well told, if a little cliche. Also, the wit that the developers threw in was very well done (I loved the species names for the humanoids!) - always a big plus! (HERE'S THE SPOILER!) The ending, however, was just wacky. You can get it to make sense in your mind, but compared to the rest of the trip, it was C grade. I hate to include stuff like this in a review, but it REALLY dragged me down. I mean to the point where I told my wife "That really changed my mind; the story was okay before, but now...." The gameplay was simple at best. The only thing I flat out enjoyed was taking pictures of different creatures. Loved it in Bioshock, too. It's too bad combat couldn't compete. Other reviews have said it before, so this shouldn't be a big surprise. Combat gameplay is just a massive clickfest. You can try and ingest some strategy into it, but you'll die more. It's not very interesting and could be removed from the game without taking away anything. The stealth sections are much better. Still, they boil down to extremely simple timing games and very obvious puzzle sections. I understandthat it's been a while since this came out, but it still seems like this was designed for a younger audience. To sum up my opinions on the game, I wouldn't recommend BGE, but I wouldn't shoot you down either. Okay, that was the review of the game. Now, for the technical side. This is a port. I get it. But come on! This thing was buggy as heck! The controls are weird, the camera is flat out attrocious, the graphics would come in and out on me, I gave up on it for a while because it kept crashing... I won't dock a game for its glitches, but be warned: your patience might be tested.

I absolutely love this game, but the PC port is just not worth the effort, especially on modern systems. It was a shoddy port that's only gotten worse with age. This game isn't designed for keyboard and mouse, and it shows. It feels so much better with a controller, but there is no controller support at all. So you're either stuck with the janky KB&M controls, or you can use software in the background to awkwardly hack controller support into the game, which is never ideal. There are some glaring graphical bugs on modern systems, such as flickering textures and effects, which can *sometimes* be fixed, but it's hit-and-miss. I was able to fix them on my old PC, but the same method doesn't work on my newer gaming laptop, so there's nothing I can do about it, and the game looks completely broken. I also experienced framerate drops today, which should NOT be happening with a game from 2003 playing on a 960M. If you have a PS3 or an Xbox 360, do yourself a favour and get the HD edition of the game that was released for those systems. It's undoubtedly the best version of the game which will give you the best experience possible. This is a wonderful game that deserves to played in a better environment. The PC version doesn't cut it.

Beyond Good & Evil plays as a mix of genres, seamlessly woven together in a surprisingly self-serious and endearing world. There are stealth sections, boss fights, races, collectables, escape sequences, environmental puzzles, mini-games and more, all accessible and good fun. The difficulty is low enough to avoid any frustration regardless of your preferences. The graphics are expressive and the sound all up to scratch. Unfortunately, the result of this design is that all of game elements lack depth. BG&E comes with nice packaging, but there's nothing in it that the average gamer won't have seen done before and done better elsewhere. The short length of the game (~12 hours for 100% completion) isn't especially satisfying. The PC port was particularly lazy - keyboard/mouse controls are awkwardly patched over the gamepad design yet a gamepad is not supported, and the partially-automatic camera tends to spaz out in the middle of combat or stealth. For new gamers, BG&E provides a wide range of 'tasters' in a well designed environment. For old gamers, it's a nice break from heavier gamers but the very definition of skippable.

Beyond Good and Evil deserves its status as a cult favorite. First off, while everything is made of chunky polygons and big pixels, it’s still a good-looking and atmospheric game. The color palette is vibrant, the character and world designs are fantastic, it has a lot of solid animations, and the soundtrack (which is included for free in this release!) is as varied as it is excellent. I would describe it as a playable cartoon with a lot of charm, humor, emotion... and even iconic characters and interesting themes! BGnE is very Zelda-like in its presentation and includes multiple gameplay styles: despite this “jack of all trades” approach, everything works as intended and it’s a fun game throughout. While I think the camera is weird at times and the stealth mechanics are not very well introduced, I never felt I was struggling against the controls, and had a blast for the entirety of my 10-12 hours playthroughs. A common criticism is that the gameplay is simplistic, but I don’t see it as an issue: it’s simply not a game you play for the challenge, and the intuitive controls and rather easy difficulty makes it a good pick for younger and inexperienced players. My only big problem with BGnE is the quality of its PC version: it’s a playable but low-effort port without noticeable improvements, controls you can’t rebind, and unfixed performance issues that already existed on release and have only gotten worse on modern systems. You may need to tinker with graphical options and install some fan-made patches for it to run well, and some framerate issues and bugs are likely to subsist anyway. In short, while I would recommend avoiding this particular version if you own a console to play it on, you should definitely give this game a try. Those were the times when developers put a lot of love and effort into making their games unique and memorable, and BGnE is a great example of that: to me, it just oozes childhood memories, even if I never got to experience it as a child!

I'm sorry, I'm yet another person who never played this game back in the day. Playing it now (2025) it still stands up and is thoroughly enjoyable. Heard some negative things about the remastered version so decided to play the original. It was amazing AFTER some tweaking. I found capping my monitor fps at 60 (otherwise cutscenes are messed up) + XPadder (for controller support) + DxWnd (for forcing a smaller windowed screen) + increasing FOV in bge.ini to be crucial. With all of these working, it was a dream. But it was very finicky to get them all (especially DxWnd) initially working so caveat emptor. This is a console-style low-FOV game at its core that is clearly meant to be played on a TV. That was never adjusted as part of the PC port. But if you don't have motion sickness or are playing on a TV you may not need all these tweaks.