A much postponed and much lauded cult hit that stood up well to the hype

I have long been aware of this game and it's reputation as being a commercial failure yet cult classic. One of the reasons it slipped me by then was that it came out amongst many other big heavy hitters including the awesome Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow of which the multiplayer mode stole many hours of my time. I very nearly again played it when the XBox 360 HD remake of it came out, but once again, it slipped me by. I then finally got it cheap on Steam and seeing as the PC version would be HD anyway and easier to configure and control, I thought this would be the best option.

I could tell as soon as I started it up that it was going to be a lot of fun. The art style, direction, music and the world as a while is all extremely nicely put together and makes a great world for you to explore. The characters themselves as well as the character interaction is very well written and feels genuine and non-cheesey so you do start to forge bonds with them. The controls, menus and interactions with in game items and people all seem much smoother than most games of this era making navigating around and doing stuff really easy and quick, which again, was a rarity in the days that this was originally released.

The only one minor gripe I would have about it is that the main meat of the story is fairly short and towards the end there is a lot of fluffing the game out by making you hunt for X number of an arbitrary item so you can get equipment you need. These side quests are still fun enough but I feel they should have stayed as side quests and not been used as the main story to fill it out. It quite reminded me of the end of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker when you were forced to amass huge amounts of money and go hunting for Triforce charts and then Triforce pieces to unlock the final dungeon. Quite tiresome and should have been side missions. Although I hear this quest has been streamlined in the new HD version of the Wind Waker so I look forward to seeing the result of that.

The main gameplay of Beyond Good and Evil focuses around a number of what could be referred to as "Dungeons" where you have to move through them unlocking various areas, co-operating with your buddies and eventually getting photographic evidence to uncover evidence of a government conspiracy. You do this through a combination of stealth, exploration, manipulating the environments and some combat. Your character is not terribly powerful so the combat can be tricky often forcing you to lean towards stealth or alternative tactics. But despite my preference of going in all guns blazing and killing everything I can clap my eyes on, I didn't mind the lean towards stealth here because it worked very well.

I'd say overall, this has a very similar feel to Zelda games because of the dungeon like areas, the exploration of the over-world, mix of stealth and combat. That's probably why it all works well together but this is placed in a very different world with a lot more interaction with the world and your team-mates than Zelda games usually does giving you a better feeling of connection to it. Also your character is not what seems to be a retarded mute.

So I would say to anyone who enjoys Zelda games or anything similar to them, this is definitely worth checking out. It is indeed a very over-looked game that is well worthy of the reputation it has earned from the undeservedly low number of people that did play it. This was also intended to be part of a trilogy but the 2nd game has been in development limbo for many many years being constantly delayed for higher priority things like (the admittedly awesome) Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends. I am really hoping that it happens now. Come on Ubisoft....you love making things into franchises. Make this into one!