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Beyond Good & Evil HD
PlayStation Network
And a Pig-Man’s Your Uncle.
2.5/5 stars
I have a weakness for hunting hidden gems from previous hardware generations. Sometimes this hunt leads to a great treasure, other times it proves the old adage that begins with, “One man’s trash…” I never played the original release of “Beyond Good & Evil” that hit the PS2, Gamecube, original Xbox, and PC. The fact that the game was not only ‘good enough’ to warrant a re-release via PSN, but also ‘good enough’ to get a full HD makeover set off my hidden gem radar. Unfortunately, it seems I need to get that adjusted.
Presentation
“Beyond Good & Evil HD” isn’t really all that HD. Yes, the game is output at HD resolution now instead of upscaled, but none of the polygon models or textures look like they were improved at all. Most distressingly, the game engine seems unable to cope with distant objects in ‘HD’ – which is odd when one of the central gimmicks of the game is that the protagonist has a camera with a zoom lens – leading many distant objects to flicker and judder around. Interestingly, the game’s overworld features a new glitch (which wasn’t in the original, according to those who have played the original) of several computer monitors that seem to hover above the ocean (at first, I thought it was a cloaked ship of some sort, but I was giving the game too much credit with that thought).
Where the environments don’t really benefit from the ‘HD’ of the remake, the character models do actually look pretty good. Lip synch is off for dialog, but this is a 6th Generation game, and that kind of problem was common.
The audio in “Beyond Good & Evil HD” is kind of a mixed bag. While the soundtrack is pretty good with a few really catchy Latin-beat songs, there is an equal amount of music that is completely forgettable. The voiceacting, likewise, is really strong for some characters, specifically Pey’j the pig-man and the Jamaican rhinoceros mechanics that run the game’s garage, but weak for most others, including the main character, Jade, who sounds oddly nasal and whose voice doesn’t seem right for the character it’s coming out of.
Technically, “Beyond Good & Evil HD” has a few annoying glitches that all deal with clipping. Sometimes floating boxes drift INTO islands when shot, leaving their contents out of reach. Also, on one occasion, I managed to ‘miss’ a wall-sidling cue that left Jade to plunge into a deep, dark pit filled with nothing and with no way out (I had to reload a previous save).
Story
“Beyond Good & Evil HD” is set in an interesting world… that is disturbingly lacking in explanations and details. It seems, to me at least, that the game is set so far in the future that evolution has lead other animal species down the path toward human sentience (a very homo-centric idea, but whatever). As a result, the world is not only populated with Homo sapiens, but also a variety of other humanoid animals like Sus sapiens (pig-man), Rhinoceros sapiens (rhino-man), Walrus sapiens (walrus-man), and others. Other wildlife that hasn’t quite reached sentience seems to be on the right track, with creatures such as Bufo erectus (caveman-toad) inhabiting the game’s non-city regions.
In this world of Hillys, our hero, Jade, a Latina photojournalist (obviously the folks at Ubisoft didn’t anticipate the collapse of photojournalism when they made this game in 2003) and martial artist with bright green lipstick, acts as a caretaker for an orphanage built in an old lighthouse, along with her ‘uncle’ Pey’j, a pig-man. This future world is far from idyllic, as an alien menace known as the DomZ (yes, with a capital Z!) continually launch meteors at the planet, which release crystalline alien sarcophagi to kidnap Hillyans for unknown reasons. The only thing standing between the Hillyans and the DomZ is an interplanetary military unit known as the Alpha Sections (yes, plural!).
In desperate need of money to keep the lighthouse shield generator running, Jade takes a job for a mysterious and wealthy individual, who turns out to be a contact for a resistance movement that wants to get rid of the Alpha Sections. At this early point in the game, I was actually expecting to be able to make a choice about which side to back – Alpha Sections or IRIS Network – considering the emphasis on ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the game’s title. But I was disappointed to learn that the game’s story is very linear and short, leading Jade and Pey’j to support the IRIS Network against the Alpha Sections.
Throughout the story, there is little work put into world-building, and even less into foreshadowing, as the story (after a HUGE point of no return) wraps up with a complete non-sequiter that also acts as a deus ex machina, and throws in a cliffhanger setup for a sequel that never actually happened.
Most of the character development revolves around nonsensical spoilers, but Jade’s two sidekicks both exhibit enough personality, even without character development, to steal the show. Pey’j the pig-man is a fat hillbilly who loves to yell the names of Mexican food when he gets excited, or take the name of the Lord in vain by shouting, “Sweet Jesus!” when he gets REALLY excited (though I would have thought that a distant future in which evolution was essentially PROVEN by most of the population would have made the concept of Jesus obsolete… but whatever). The other sidekick is a mysterious human named ‘Double H’ (we unfortunately never learn his real name or what ‘Double H’ stands for), who disguises himself as an enemy guard and spends most of his time quoting a book called, ‘Carlson and Peeters’ (which is also, unfortunately, never actually explained). I wanted to like both of these sidekicks, as their mannerisms made them seem like great guys (Pey’j smiling and waving at the camera whenever Jade went to take a picture with him in the vicinity was priceless), but the game’s narrative just didn’t provide enough meat to flesh out the plot, let alone a cast of characters.
Gameplay
“Beyond Good & Evil HD” tries to take gameplay concepts from a whole bunch of different games and genres: There’s photography like in “Pokemon Snap,” combat and dungeon exploration like in “The Legend of Zelda,” stealth like in “Metal Gear Solid,” hovercraft racing like in “Wipeout,” and spaceship battles like in “Starfox.” Unfortunately, ‘try’ is all the game does, as it fails completely to be as enjoyable as any of the games whose mechanics it copies.
The two key problems with “Beyond Good & Evil HD” are the controls and the camera. When moving Jade around the game’s environments, it feels like the game doesn’t really want her to go where the player wants (both Jade and her sidekicks have a horrible propensity to get caught on the edges of environmental objects) and the camera certainly doesn’t want to look at her or focus on what the player wants to look at. The combat engine is overly combo based (simply by mashing Square a lot) with shuffly dodges thrown in for kicks (by mashing X). The problem is that, once Jade hits an enemy, it gets knocked back out of range from follow-up blows. Not only that, but attacks and dodges seem to react differently depending on the direction the player moves the left analog stick or via contextual cues, which left me feeling like I was never in control during battle. Even worse, it’s possible to hit Jade’s sidekicks and ACTUALLY DEAL DAMAGE to them, which is a pain when they insist on getting into the middle of the action at all times. When riding in the hovercraft or spaceship, the controls are just as bad, with extremely floaty turning (I guess it IS a hovercraft) and NO BRAKES. About halfway through the game, Jade gains the ability to shoot energy discs out of her camera (??!), and I found that half the time I tried to use these to disable a guard, they’d bounce off the wall I was hiding behind (despite a clear line of sight) and make enough noise to attract the guard’s attention (which oftentimes amounted to an insta-kill moment when the guard triggered a laser turret in the ceiling).
The game’s camera, though, it definitely the worst offender in ruining the gameplay. It doesn’t follow Jade correctly most of the time, is difficult to adjust with the right analog stick, frequently goes into static camera angles that are poorly laid-out, and doesn’t stay facing the right direction when Jade switches to her camera zoom. The entire time I was playing this game, I felt like I was fighting the camera more often than enemies. It also reminded me of some of the earliest attempts at making 3D games on the PS1 and N64 where the developers completely bungled the camera angles and controls. “Beyond Good & Evil HD” is supposed to be an improved remake of a PS2 game: It would have been unacceptable to have a camera this bad in a PS2 game to begin with, but not fixing it for the ‘HD’ remake is a complete failure on the part of Ubisoft.
Overall
“Beyond Good & Evil HD” is an action/adventure game that combines a lot of disparate elements from other sub-genres, but doesn’t do any of them particularly well. Between clunky controls and an even clunkier camera, I never felt like I was having a particularly good time playing the game. Add in a weak story that doesn’t go ‘beyond’ anything, and the result is a completely lukewarm experience. I don’t know why this game received an ‘HD’ remake, as outside of a handful of mildly-interesting-but-barely-developed characters, it isn’t anything special.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 2.5/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Overall (not an average): 2.5/5
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