Beyond Good & Evil

2024-09-08
If you're going to play Beyond Good & Evil for the first time in 2024 like me you're here vibes more than anything else. You're here because there are Rasta rhinos that run a mechanic shop (and scratch their butts for their idle animation), that weird French "Revolution" song that plays in the bar, and a game that replaces guns with a camera. What you're not here is for the actual gameplay which is made up of bits of combat, bits of hoverboat riding, bits of taking pictures of stuff, and stealth sections. What's here is creaky and the ratio of what's actually fun is inverted because the thing you spend some of the least time doing, hoverboat sections, are the most fun and the floaty, lifeless combat and tedious stealth make up the vast majority of the rest of the time. You can tell it's a product of that "everything but the kitchen sink" game design where the team just tried to jam in as many features as possible and some came out great (hoverboat and camera) and some came out...well, they came out (combat, stealth). Ultimately I'd only recommend it for someone wants to immerse themselves in a truly unique game of the time otherwise this is a solid pass.