Beyond Good & Evil™

This game has a strong story, good graphics and some interesting elements. However, the consistent camera switchovers which alter how controls function, and the inconsistency of the controls themselves (sometimes toggling, sometimes not, for example) introduce a level of frustration that quite simply kills the experience. Add to this the kitchen sink aspect (stealth, melee combat, driving, shooting, photographing and the occasional platform puzzle) means that none of these aspects are done as well as they really needed to be done. All in all, a potentially excellent effort brought down by technical issues. Perhaps better with a gamepad or on a console, but I would not recommend for a PC.

The game itself had promise. I liked the aesthetics, the story seemed fine, there was a reasonable amount of exploration, the photograph sidequest just the right amount of distracting. Voice acting better than average, sound effects and music perfectly OK. But there were one half-major and one fully major issue. The half-major issue was that no matter how much I tried tweaking the graphical settings, there would constantly be glitches in the menu screen. I have no idea what I should do to fix it, and I'm possibly "spoiled" by console gaming, but I'm not one of those people that enjoys having to spend about 30% of my gametime trying to make things stop flickering in and out of graphical existence. And then there's the fact that this game most definitely was made for a console. The PC controls are awkward, and I was longing for a gamepad. Then I suddenly realised that my X360 controller will most likely be able to be plugged into my modern computer and be playable with. Well, the first part was true, and I got it hooked up and the necessary software updates done, and I was opening the options menu to configure... And the game doesn't support gamepads. At all. Yes, I am aware that it's possible to "fool" a computer into thinking your gamepad is like a keyboard, but seriously, I just grew sick of an otherwise good game not even trying to meet me halfway on this, and haven't played it since.

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.

This game has been around for a long time. It's beyond crazy that GOG hasn't integrated the various fixes so we don't have to futz around sorting it all out. Wide screen, modern systems, etc. GOG, do the work so we don't have to! The game is unplayable without the fixes!

Lot artifacts even by using DxWnd tweaks...shame the game is good I know it but the graphics bugs ruins everything.If the devs release the source code people could fix the game engine and game to make it run in current tech...if only