So, I've just finished Beyond a Steel Sky and my overall impression is that it's a really good game. A great one, even, save for some (mostly technical) issues holding it back.
For one I have to disagree with Frog on the story. Although, perhaps not over the story itself but rather the characterization of it. I think it's giving the game's narrative short shrift to describe it as "thin." There are many exciting, fun, tense and even genuinely heartfelt moments in Beyond. While the existence of a "secretly" darker tone to Union City's colorful new utopian paint job will surprise no one, I feel the specific final surprise was well done.
As well as the final confrontation with the various ministry heads in LINC space. While there certainly are elements I would deem passe
(there isn't a single second someone wouldn't assume the "reflection spa" is some kind of brainwashing), on the whole it's quite good. I'd honestly put it up there with some of Revolution's best. It probably wont dethrone the original BaSS for ppl with played in the 90s and have been growing a nostalgic reverence for that game over decades, but as someone who enjoyed Beneath a year or two ago I'd say its easily on par. In some ways better.
The hacking system is fun and clever. I would have like some more dynamic outcomes from it, though. It's fun to mess around with it but sometimes I'd swap out some logic in a fashion I'd thought was clever only to have nothing happen. It's definitely the meat & potatoes of Beyond's puzzle solving. There are occasionaly some other types of puzzles too, though. Which gives a decent variety to the gameplay. I'd place the difficulty at about a medium. You'll definitely be required to use some outside the box thinking and there are some genuinely challenging moments. I like that Revolution is taking gameplay risks and this one is a success.
Graphically I think the game can be quite gorgeous at times. The environments, especially. There's some truly phenomenal views out into the city, with an amazing sense of scale. It feels grand, it feels enormous, even if the locations you're actually exploring aren't all that big. Problems arise with the characters, though. A lot of the facial expressions feel off and certain scenes are let down by bad animation. A noteworthy example being
the final fight between Foster and Alonso, the Minister of Wellbeing. It should be this lavishly animated epic struggle but it just looks goofy. Unfinished even. It's clearly an issue of budget/dev time rather than talent because other scenes in the game are animated really well. Which, ultimately makes the bad moments that much more noticeable.
The other big issue the game has is bugs. It seems that I've personally lucked out in this regard, though. I never ran into anything game-breaking or even all that frustrating. For the most part it was just the occasional camera angle gone wrong or an NPC standing where the yshouldn't be during a cutscene. I did encounter one annoying bug where I couldn't reset the programming variables in the Piazza for some reason. It made solving a puzzle more of a hassle than it should've been but it was fixed after a quick re-load of a prior save.
Although, from reading impressions I can tell that my relatively stable experience has not been the experience of many ppl playing this game. Even on the PC version it seems there are an abundance severe or even game breaking bugs still in the game. I was reading someone's impressions on Discord and they described 5 hard crashes within two hours of gameplay. There's really no excuse for that. Even though my own experience was relatively smooth, this game clearly needed far more QA testing. I can only hope Revolution patches these issues as quickly as possible. At this point early players are functioning as beta testers for the game and that sucks.
In the end I'd give Beyond a Steel Sky an 8.2/10. It's a really well made adventure game that blends the modern and classic successfully. It's unfortunate that aspects are let down by a lack of polish but the core experience is really strong. I liked it enough to now be on a second playthrough, immediately after finishing. Just to spend some more time in the world and with those characters. For my money this is the best Revolution game since Broken Sword 2.
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