Bad stuff first: - The control scheme is clearly meant to be played on a gamepad. WSAD + mouse for the camera is no substitute in a game of this sort. (There is even a particular section of the game -- the "Alpha Sections Und. Headquarters" -- that cannot be fully accessed due to this issue. Fortunately this area of the game is an optional one, so it's not what they call, in the debugging world, a "show-stopper." But it's still an egregiously bad problem to encounter.) - The camera can get wonky, especially in narrow areas. Not anything majorly bad, but there were times where I definitely felt I was fighting against the camera to get it to point where I wanted it to point. - A lot of the missions have very dark interior areas. Even when raising the gamma so much that the well-lit areas were a bit too bright (and doing this independently from the program, I might add -- there is no way to adjust this game's brightness inside the game settings) I found certain areas to be too dark to see properly. - This is not one of GOG's older games; consequently, if you have an older rig (in my case I am dealing with an integrated Intel video processor, instead of a proper video card), you will likely experience framerate problems, even with everything on low settings. Now, that may sound like a "no duh" sort of thing, and not worth dinging the score over... but this becomes a worse problem than in most games when you realize that cutscene audio in this game is set up in a way where it is only triggered by the beginning of the cutscene (instead of by events within the cutscene), and can easily desync from the video and lag behind the events occurring onscreen due to this issue. This doesn't happen in all cutscenes -- only in ones that are overloaded with enough stuff (characters, large outdoor scenery, particle effects, etc.) to slow your framerate down below whatever the game's acceptable minimum is. All that said... you should still get this game. The gameplay blends different elements together (stealthing, puzzle-solving, racing, melee combat, vehicle combat, to name some) in a very interesting and refreshing way. Not the kind of game you see every day. The story isn't stellar, and leans a tad too much on "anti-authority" cliches, but it's still a very good, engaging, entertaining storyline, and is well put-together. The soundtrack also stuck out as being particularly impressive (the music from the racetracks being my personal favorite, but really, just about all of the music in this game is really good). Don't let my three stars dissuade you from playing the game entirely; this is a very good game that deserves to be played. But try to get it on a console first, especially if your computer is, like mine, not a proper gaming PC. (As of this writing there's also the Beyond Good and Evil Hi Def version that's planned for release on modern-gen consoles to consider as well.) If getting the console version simply isn't an option, then get the one from GOG -- the PC version of BG&E is not the best, but it's most assuredly better than not playing it at all.
