Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition – Test and News

With only one episode to its credit, the Beyond Good & Evil franchise has an aura that allows it to cross console generations. To keep us waiting until the release of the second episode, which is slow in coming, Jade's adventures have already been entitled to a first HD remaster released, among others, on Xbox Live Arcade in 2011. Still with the aim of measuring the appeal of players around the license, Ubisoft is this time offering us a second remaster called Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition, with the intention of making it the ultimate version.

Like the original game, Beyond Good & Evil 20th Anniversary Edition starts with a short introduction that takes the form of a Breaking News broadcast during a TV news program. Just enough to tell us that the developers have decided to send us to the planet Hyllis, prey to attacks from space. It is in this context that a new alert forces Jade to deploy the energy shield that protects the orphanage where she lives, without success. In In just a few seconds, we are already immersed in the actionhaving to fight a few hostile creatures, without any other form of explanation. This is also the main flaw of the game, which parachutes us into an unknown universe without giving us the minimum of baggage to find our way around. A flaw that will obviously not affect people who have been able to do it previously, but which still fails to engage new players, now accustomed to being served an accessible lore, without having to wonder where they have set foot.

Once we have gone through these legitimate questions, we quickly find ourselves faced with to the very old-school atmosphere of the game, in what is charming about it. The sets may have undergone a facelift to celebrate this twentieth anniversary in style, but that doesn't stop us from facing environments that are sometimes cut with a billhook, capable of taking us back to the era of 3D platform games, minus the aliasing and slobbery textures. The world of Hyllis is quite small and is explored aboard a hovercraft that allows you to reach the different destinations offered to Jade and her sidekick Pey'j, friends like pigs. A map that serves as a central point, for a principle which tends towards the Collectathon à la Super Mario 64. Understand that Jade must collect pearls during her adventure, and that her progress is conditional on the use of these pearls to purchase new elements intended for the hovercraft, which then allows access to new places.

Hovercraft sequences which also give rise to some battles on the water since the machine is capable of firing missiles, while it is also possible to engage in races to try to collect new pearls. A few optional locations are also scattered around the map, which which pushes the player to explore every corner of it in order to complete the game 100%. Because besides the pearls, the Collectathon side is also marked by the presence of other elements to collect like the discs, but especially the photos. Essential mechanic of Beyond Good & Evil, photography justifies on the one hand Jade's status as a journalist, but above all forces the player to open his eyes and stay on the lookout for his environment. To be used very simply thanks to the triggers, the camera becomes the essential tool to recover clues during the missions entrusted to the heroine, but also allows to reference the fauna and flora of the planet Hyllis. We take quickly develop a taste for finding a rare species or catching a fish on the fly, all helped by a mechanism that has not aged one iota.

But this is obviously not Jade's only asset, in a game that alternates the phases of play rather well. If the first minutes taught us to wield the stick to hit enemiesother sequences invite rather at discretion. The infiltration phases are quite classic with the need to crouch down to not make noise, and to hide behind elements of the decor to not be seen. The title is quite permissive elsewhere since it is quite easy to be forgotten in general, while adding automatic backup which was not present in the original game, allows you to quickly return to a problematic passage, without having to reload a manual save made several minutes previously. This greatly simplifies the experience, but it's also good more suited to modern times and how the majority of players perceive their current gaming experience.

More complicated to adapt to our new ways of playing, the fights are far from being exciting and suffer from a slightly unpleasant heaviness. Nothing too bad, especially since the title is not not really punitive, but we would have liked to be able to move Jade a little more flexibly, like what the Aspyr Media studio managed to do on the remasters of the first Tomb Raider. Especially since the animations are quite successful and could have contributed to offering beautiful choreographies. A small feature of the Beyond Good & Evil game, Jade is accompanied by an acolyte capable of carrying out various actions at the player's request. Stun opponents in combat, push a block, stand on a switch, or pull a bomb out of the ground. This also allows to diversify a little from the basic nice puzzles, and which sometimes force you to rack your brains. We add to this the possibility of obtaining objects in the different dungeons visited, and we obtain a sufficiently complete adventure, with a lifespan of around twelve hours.

To talk more specifically about what has been brought to this remaster, we can specify that Most of the music has been reworked and thus continues to contribute to the overall charm of the general atmosphere.. A few bugs disrupted our adventure, with crashes linked to Quick Resume and a home menu that took forever to launch. Among the faults that we already found in the original version, we regret that the atmosphere regularly places us between two feelings, with particularly dark and a scenario that aims to be mature, while the general atmosphere is ultimately quite light. An inconsistency which sometimes suggests that the game borrows from parody, especially since the dubbing of the time, entirely in French, contributes somewhat to this impression. Same thing with the staging, clearly dated, and which constantly reminds us that we are facing a 20-year-old title.