BG&E is an Ubisoft game and it was surprisingly good… I hadn’t expected it, from the cover. (i know, so bad of me.) There’re versions for consoles as well as the PC. The name is a bit pretentious, all things considered… I don’t think it quite lives up to the implied philisophical pedigree (if you didn’t realize, there is a book by the same title which was written by Nietzsche)… but still, it’s a good number of hours of entertainment.

Graphics were great… nothing new or impressive, but just really nice and clean looking, especially if you have the antialiasing on. The cartoony feel of the characters is comfortable and not too exaggerated, so any character closeups that occurred didn’t feel cheap or forced. The animation looked right (god knows Jade’s running looked a lot more natural than Lydia’s from Keepsake) and was never buggy. The water in this game looked really nice too, especially if you can afford to put water details all the way up to high (which I was NOT able to do. T_T; )

(I actually read, later, that the game engine used to produce BG&E is the same as Prince of Persia… which I can totally believe. They do feel somewhat similar, game mechanics and all.)

Game mechanics… this is where it starts to get a little more interesting. The game’s extremely varied as far as gameplay’s concerned, lots of different things to do, so it was probably a bit of a challenge to figure out all the controls and make them feel intuitive. The fighting feels, as I noted earlier, a bit like Prince of Persia or perhaps Kingdom Hearts: you point yourself in a direction and start spamming the attack button. Do it rapidly enough and you’ll get a combo off and do a little extra damage.

There are situations in which your sidekick can execute some particular move to help you accomplish something, which was kind of a nice way to create interaction between the player and the AI. Healing up was also a possibility… just hit a button to consume the food in your bag. Even when your character was down and knocked out on the ground, you could still hit the button to eat, which I thought was unrealistic, but it saved my butt a couple times, so I’m not going to complain. XD

There’re a couple vehicles in the game… the hovercraft and the flyer thing. Hovercraft felt like Diddy Kong Racing’s hovercrafts and the flyer felt like Starfox, with a target lock and everything. XD I’m not a fan of racing in general and they do make you race the hovercraft through at least two races… but they were pretty easy after you learned the track, so it wasn’t that big a deal.

The only thing that troubled me a little was in the sneaking around part. Even after assigning crouch to a key that should have been very natural to hold down in addition to other keys (I made it ctrl), it was still terribly awkward since you often had to stay crouched for extended periods of time. This would probably have been a nonissue on a gamepad.

Story was excellent! I was properly intrigued by the first ten minutes and it held the entire time. I was able to make a couple predictions that ended up coming true, but it didn’t hurt my enjoyment of the story all the same. I have to admit that the story’s not really original by any means, but the game’s presentation and pacing made it feel fresh anyway. I was a teensy, eesny bit disappointed by the revelation at the very end… it felt rather sudden and incomplete, like I wanted to know more details. And then there was that scene at the end of the credits… which was, I suppose, meant to create the pathway for a sequel. Should have gone without it! >:\ But I read that the director of BG&E had originally planned a trilogy of games, so I guess that would have been their excuse for those things.

Sound and music… I was surprised here too, but the music was actually pretty awesome, enough for me to go download the OST (which was offered free by Ubisoft; that’s really way too cool :x ). I’d say half of the soundtrack is really quite good and appropriate to the game, whereas the other half is average. Composer is Christophe Heral… who hasn’t done anything else that I recognize. And there are actually lyrics for a good number of the songs. The Hillys theme is very sweet and the Akuda Bar theme is properly grungy sounding/feeling. (I didn’t realize until I saw the name of the track that what the people in the track are actually saying is “propaganda”. :o ) Voice acting was terrific… no complaints there.

Was the actual game fun? Yeah, I’d say so. There were, as I mentioned, a large variety of game play mechanics. The main character here is a journalist; her job is to go around on missions, taking risky pictures, and then sending them to someone to publish as evidence. So sneaking around makes up a whole portion of the game; which can be kind of nervewracking, but there’s never a time limit and the game is very forgiving about screwing up. Sometimes you can just run around a corner and the enemy will forget about you (after sending out something that annihilates everything in one hit, which one hit you as long as you’re around the corner XD ). Other times, you get caught and just start over a little ways away.

Taking photographs is mostly very easy, but adds some flavor to the game. Click a button to go into camera mode, mouselook around, up/down to zoom. They put a couple restrictions on acceptable pictures… “too far” and “bad framing”… but once you’re on a clean shot, the circles will turn green, so you know you’re good and can snap the frame. There’re a ton of things to take pictures of, from living organisms wandering around to the barcodes of security consoles so that you can be sent the code to break through. You can also use the camera to analyze things from far away, if you’re not sure what it is or what it’s capable of doing.

And then there’s fighting. Was pretty simple, point and click, and one power move that I very rarely ended up using, simply because there never seemed to be a good situation for it. Jade has a staff-like thing for close combat and eventually gets an energy thrower thing that can accomplish some long range stuff. The latter is used for solving puzzles occasionally, as you can use it to hit switches from far away. You could also manipulate your enemies in combat, by having your sidekick do a ground pound, which bounces your enemy up and allows you to whack them into other objects, like ramps that fall down so you can use them, or other enemies for an insta-kill. (the aiming interface was really bizarre when I first saw it; I had no idea what I was even looking at, but it was easy once I realized what it was for).

I have to mention the boss fights, which were extremely clever. All the bosses had their shtick, which you had to figure out and then exploit. Most of them were, again, not very original and could be figured out after a short half a minute of experimentation, but I preferred this method to the plain old hack-n-slash method of just learning how to maneuver better. The final boss battle was actually fairly amazing… the boss has a couple different phases and the final phase was probably one that would impress half the audience and piss off the other. Not going to spoil it… just saying it was… ingenious… and took a little practice before I was able to kill the boss in the end. :P

Overall impression: pretty pleased! Not overwhelmingly awesome, but still a very good time.