Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil had some degree of hype and yet when it came out, it vanished off of everyone's radar. For what its worth, BG&E is a very solid game.

The planet of Hyllis is under constant attack from an evil alien species known as the DomZ. They are constantly fended off by an army called the Alpha Section...or are they? As female reporter Jade, the main goal is to uncover a massive conspiracy. The storyline here is fairly solid, but the ending is paticularly weak.

The game is reminiscent of Ocarina of Time - jumps are done automatically and you'll never have to worry of falling to your death. However the camera can often present a problem. Combat consists of automatically locking on to an emeny, dodging attacks and hitting them with your staff. Fights are few and far between, but when they happen they are pretty exciting, if just because you can throw an attack from any direction and do really long combos. Also, since you'll usually have someone following you around, they'll help out in the fighting. You can tell them to do a Super attack that consists of them hitting the floor thus tossing all of the enemies in the air, allowing you to aim and hit the enemies in any direction. However, dying in combat is no big deal, as you'll usually respawn near where you died.



There's also some stealth thrown in. For the most part, this is well done. You'll do a lot of crouching in the game for cover. Most of the time you can screw stealth and try fighting your way through, but the guards put up a fight.

Being as Jade is a reporter, she can put her camera to good use. This game has arguably the best use of a camera to date. Besides taking photos as evidence, you can snap photos of different animals for money and more pearls. (Pearls are the game's equivalent to stars, jingos, power cells, whatever) Being as how species can include wildlife, NPCs or enemies there's a lot of photowork that can be done.

When you're not on foot, you can manuever a hovercraft. During the game, you'll get the ability for your craft to shoot projectiles and jump. For the most part it handles well. You can compete in races or enter "looter's caverns" where you chase a small ship that steals some of your money. Later you'll have acess to a spaceship, but by then you'll be nearly finished the game.



Unfortunatly, the game itself isn't very long, and on top of that, it borrows the Super Mario 64 concept of having to collect a certain amount of something (in this case, pearls) to move on. In this case, its not so bad since you can get a Pearl detector that indicates where to find pearls and in many cases, you can find a bunch of pearls together. But even then, the game can be beaten in a rental. However, you'll have a great time getting there and the game's unique charm, polished gameplay and production values make it worth looking at.