Mini Review – Beyond Good & Evil HD
Adventure
Return of the classic that nobody bought.
Ian
Firstly, let me note that I never played this game the first time round (nobody did – Ed) so any perceptions are strictly of the moment, rather than tinted by any sort of nostalgia.
Once the sizeable 1Gb+ download has finished (walk the dog or make dinner or something other than staring at an interminable progress bar), the first thing that’ll strike you is that for a game of its era, Beyond Good & Evil has aged pretty well, despite the HD visuals, character models (with their GTA3 style hands) and textures betraying their last-gen origins. Also despite one of the incidental characters supposedly being Spanish, you’ll notice how very French it all feels.
The game opens with an idyllic cerulean coloured planet with lens flare a-plenty. Your playable character Jade is cavorting with her animal chums as the planet is suddenly beset by an onslaught of alien drop-pods (imagine Half-Life 2 capsules only with seven foot tall floating aliens instead of headcrabs). You get right into the action, revelling in the one button combat. Again this highlights the fact the game has its roots on the Gamecube with its one big green A button. After an all too easy boss fight and some thankfully brief plot exposition you’re introduced to one of the game’s central mechanics, taking photographs with your soon-to-be-ever-present camera. The schtick, to begin with at least, is that you’re helping to catalogue each unique species on your wonderfully diverse planet. So far, so Pokemon Snap. Hey, it’s a leap forward from Michael Ancel’s previous creation Rayman. I hated that whole series. Broke-ass floating limbed sucker. But anyway. For each photograph you capture of a new species, you’ll get some in-game currency and for every roll of film you complete you gain a power-up, the first being a zoom lens for your newly acquired pictobox.
Authentic 'hiding in shadows' French gameplay.
What passes for the in-game narrative soon shepherds you off your island refuge into the great wide world in a rickety hovercraft (also unlocking your first achievement) which soon breaks down, leading to your being towed to a garage by yet another thinly veiled racial stereotype, mon.
Rather than go through the entire plot and potentially spoiling it for newcomers, there soon ensue exploratory larks a-plenty during which you collect CDs (one achievement), pearls (another one, yep) and take a minimum of six rolls worth of photographs (you guessed it, with an associated achievement). Thankfully the criteria for these collect-oh-achievements aren’t so stringent that you need to collect every single item, all giving you a little leeway to miss one or two along the way and still fulfil the required conditions. Sorta like the barrels in Fuel only without the sweeping vistas.
You’ll soon see what all the fuss was about in 2004, although sometimes you’ll notice how incredibly of its time the game is, down to the clumsy eco-warrior vibe that sometimes pervades or the needless races that remind me of the awful swoop races in KOTOR (in terms of arbitrary chore at least).
In short then, a benchmark for retro-revivals via download. This is how it should be done, not the horrid mess that was Perfect Dark 64‘s rehash or the somehow-made-worse-by-the-exclusion-of-The-Offspring hotchpotch that Sega made of Crazy Taxi XBLA. Well worth your 800 space groats and saves you having to dig out the GC to play it.
8/10