Beyond: Two Souls (PlayStation 3) review"As a fan of Heavy Rain, I wasn't expecting anything really amazing from the gameplay of Beyond. What I was excited for was another dose of what made that game good: a compelling, if sometimes bizarre story that forces the player to think about his or her choices. In this regard, Beyond fails completely." |
Beyond: Two Souls is Quantic Dream's follow up to one of the more interesting games to come out for the PS3, Heavy Rain. Like its predecessor, Beyond is a story driven experience with most gameplay derived from QTEs and decision making. But does the cinematic style and excellent production value equal a worthwhile game?
Beyond's gameplay consists of two modes. The majority of the time you will be playing as Jodie, finely voice acted by Ellen Page. Jodie controls about the same as the characters in Heavy Rain, meaning you navigate in third person and perform most meaningful actions with QTEs of varying complexity. Short actions such as picking up an object or opening a door are done by moving the right analog stick towards the white marker indicating an object can be manipulated. More difficult actions require timed presses of multiple buttons, or even shaking the controller a specific way.
The controls here are a step backward from Heavy Rain. More than once the camera angles shifted on me for dramatic effect and caused me to send Jodie in the wrong direction repeatedly. More seriously, the tiny white dots that serve to notify you that Jodie can interact with something are very easy to miss. Very often I saw white dots that were just weird lighting effects and weren't an actual indication of anything. Worst of all, the main combat QTE now consists of a slow motion moment in which you must press the right stick in the direction Jodie should go. Not only is this too simplistic to make the combat interactivity interesting, it is also horribly broken. Sometimes Jodie heads right into an attackers strike to block it, and you need to move the stick that way. Other times, she ducks or moves to the side. But much of the time Jodie doesn't telegraph which action she's going to attempt blatantly enough for you to know which way to go. I often found myself moving the stick towards my attacker to parry and getting struck because I didn't move a different way to dodge, and vice versa.
The other mode allows you or another player to control a ghost-like entity called Aiden that is attached to Jodie. Invisible to everyone, Aiden can move through solid matter and interact with certain people and objects using a weird control scheme that consists of locking on with L1 and moving the two analog sticks in a few different ways to properly affect your target. There are only a very few ways to move the sticks and accomplish what's necessary, and this mode gets old pretty quickly.
As a fan of Heavy Rain, I wasn't expecting anything really amazing from the gameplay of Beyond. What I was excited for was another dose of what made that game good: a compelling, if sometimes bizarre story that forces the player to think about his or her choices. In this regard, Beyond fails completely.
The basic plot is that Jodie is raised mostly in a lab and then forcibly recruited into the CIA because of her connection to Aiden. The story jumps back and forth through time, covering about fifteen years in Jodie's life. It's a cool idea, but it isn't executed well. Seeing Jodie's life as a little girl is some of the most compelling content in the game. A couple episodes in her adult life unrelated to the rest of the plot are also pretty entertaining. But everything gets overridden by some truly outlandish CIA jobs that are more goofy than thrilling. After only an hour or so of getting to know a new set of characters who offered more plot possibilities than the yawn inducing CIA nonsense ever did I flashed back to a pointless, Black Hawk Down-esque assassination mission in Africa.
The action in that section would have been more at home in an Uncharted than a game like this. The controls here don't work for a cover shooter. The game had me press a button to look out from cover and simply press another to flawlessly run and slide to the next cover wall without being seen. And if I saw a bad guy? An R1 appeared by his head. Press R1 for a perfect headshot. Having fun yet? No? Here come lame Aiden puzzles and broken slow motion QTEs! Is that better?
On the plus side, once the main story thread turns to completely over the top science fiction it gets much better. Ridiculous, sure, but with some great visuals and cool action. Another positive is that it seems that Quantic Dream took to heart the criticisms of the voice acting in their previous effort. The performances from Ellen Page, Willem Dafoe, and the other voice actors who didn't get above-the-title billing are all quite good.
But the biggest problem with the story is that your choices throughout don't actually matter. You can pretty much pick your ending at the finale regardless of most of your choices. That, for me, was an immense disappointment. Still, if you were a fan of Heavy Rain, Beyond may be worth a rental. Otherwise, avoid this one. It stinks.
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