HERE IS THE SUMMARY FROM IGN FOR BEYOND 2 SOULS:
From the makers of the award-winning Heavy Rain comes a unique,
psychological action thriller. Featuring a brand-new game engine, a
compelling, original story, and a top-notch Hollywood cast; Beyond: Two
Souls offers a sophisticated, technologically advanced, immersive gaming
experience on PlayStation 3.
Live the remarkable life of Jodie Holmes, a young woman who possesses
supernatural powers through a psychic link to an invisible entity.
Experience the most striking moments of Jodie's life as your actions and
decisions determine her fate. As she traverses the globe, Jodie will
face incredible challenges against a backdrop of emotionally-charged
events never before seen in a video game.
HERE IS THE REVIEW (CRAPPY BIASED XBOT FANBOY REVIEWER HOWEVER) FROM IGN FOR BEYOND 2 SOULS.
If you are the type who scrolls down a review to see the score before
reading the text, know this first: I have never found assigning a
number to a game so difficult. This is principally because Beyond: Two Souls
takes the vision that writer/creative director David Cage and his team
at Quantic Dream have held onto for so long - that interactive drama is
the way to make gamers conditioned to meaningless violence
feel
something in the depths of our brittle souls - to unprecedented
extremes. But Beyond is a game that made me feel too much like a passive
participant, which made “playing” it a very confusing and unrewarding
experience.
Indeed, if there was ever a game that suggested that Cage is a
frustrated film director at heart, it’s this one. Beyond is an opus – a
muddy and unfocused one, but an opus – packed with so much plot it feels
like Cage has indulged his every whim and want in a single project.
Unlike Heavy Rain before it, which dipped into silliness but was at
least thematically consistent, Beyond’s only consistency is its focus on
Jodie Holmes, the game's tragic heroine. She’s a character wonderfully
realized by actress Ellen Page, who proves to be much of Beyond’s saving
grace.
Jodie’s story is told in chapters out of chronological order across
15 years of her life. Beyond dances between these chapters: Jodie as a
little girl, Jodie as a stubborn teen, Jodie as a young woman, Jodie as a
little girl again, and so on. Her plight is driven by an unwanted
tethering to a Poltergeist-like spirit she calls Aiden, whom you can
also control depending on the circumstance.
This flitting back and forth across multiple eras of Jodie’s life
presents a couple of problems. It gives Beyond a schizophrenic,the
progression of the narrative. Next to something like Quentin
Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, this experiment with chronology feels
unfocused; we are frequently thrust into deeply dramatic scenes that
claw at our tear ducts far too early, before we’ve had the chance to
fully invest in characters and their circumstances.
In truth, Beyond’s plot would still feel disjointed even if it were
told in order. Those familiar with Quantic’s previous works, most
notably Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, should not expect anything more
focused here. The story takes us from horror (where the influence of
Brian de Palma and Adrian Lyne is strong) to drama, action, and sci-fi,
and it’s peppered with pulp: evil government conspiracies, supernatural
enemies, and cackling bad guys from distant climates abound.
Cage has said in interviews that switching between genres and tone
was a conscious choice, as nobody’s life is ever one flat note. But this
is not a real life. This is a story about a girl and her ghost, and
there is a reason filmmakers tend to stick with one genre or another: so
as to craft a cohesive narrative. It is unfortunate there is no such
discipline to be found here.
Occasionally, the plot does sing, and is dotted with moments that
compelled me to continue playing. Cage’s best work comes out in the
quieter, more human moments in his stories. Helping a teenage Jodie
agonize over which music to choose at a party is one such moment;
playing guitar on the streets in the middle of a bitter winter to earn
enough money to buy food is another.
In these scenes, Ellen Page has the opportunity to really make us
care for Jodie. Page is an eminently likeable and capable actress and
gamely takes on Cage’s crazy twists and turns, delivering her lines with
nothing less than utter sincerity. The rest of the cast don’t always
grant him the same favour, and frequently slip into broad theatrical
strokes (“for the love of God, she’s a monster!”) because the writing
grants them this luxury. Page – and yes, Willem Dafoe, although he’s
simply doing his Norman Osborne routine here – knows when to downplay
the crazy and put emphasis on those smaller moments. It is principally
thanks to her, although Cage does deserve some credit here too, that I
felt a lump in my throat at the end.
What’s missing, then, is the actual game built around this story. The
system that allows us to interact with Jodie’s world has been
streamlined for the better since Heavy Rain, and for the most part the
action buttons - those much-maligned perpetrators of quick-time events
(QTEs) - have been discarded. They’re replaced with more intuitive
contextual interactions on the right thumbstick, or iPhone touchscreen
if you choose to play with an even further-simplified control scheme.
Anything you can interact with in the world is indicated by a white
dot; move the right stick in the direction that feels natural, and Jodie
will do the predictable thing: pick up a doll, take a shower, sit down
on a chair. There are the occasional instances of QTE prompts in moments
of high tension, although they are relatively unobtrusive and feel
natural within that context.
Navigating Aiden, too, is easy enough. You can switch to him when
Jodie needs help, and a press of the triangle button will propel you
into a first person view with a satisfying woosh. In his form you can
pass through walls and ceilings to possess certain enemies (why some but
not all is not explained), kill certain enemies (ditto), move certain
items and occasionally feed Jodie flashbacks via a telepathic link so
she knows how to progress. There is little coherency to the system, for
Aiden’s usefulness is determined on a contextual basis by Quantic.
Rarely did I feel as if I was using Aiden to progress based on my own
intuition alone.
When he is required, Jodie will use one of a handful of verbal
prompts: “help me Aiden,” “get rid of them, Aiden,” and so on. His goals
tend to be blatantly signposted - a character to possess immediately to
the left, an interactive bit of ghost dust in the room above. Further,
you can’t always switch to him; it seems Aiden is a stubborn spirit.
This simplistic gameplay and Aiden’s limitations are disappointing,
particularly if one considers the potential for dynamic puzzle-solving
interplay between Jodie and Aiden in co-op mode.
Combat is the weakest aspect of Quantic’s new control scheme. Time
slows down during physical fights, and you must move the right stick in
the same direction as Jodie’s body to block or punch or kick. Her body
isn’t always easy to read –and you only have a couple of seconds in
which to do so – so frequently I found myself ducking instead of
kicking, or moving backwards instead of forwards.
It’s no matter: the outcome will be the same regardless. Jodie can
get stabbed, beat up, pushed off the side of a building; she’ll always
be fine on the other side. In circumstances where this invulnerability
system is overtly nonsensical – when she gets shot for example – Aiden
will simply heal her.
This constant push and pull between our sense that we are impacting
the story and the story itself has always been at the heart of
everything David Cage has created, but it’s examples like these that
highlight just how passive Beyond made me feel. There are, of course,
choices: on Quantic’s whim, you can choose how Jodie responds in
conversation, whether she’ll dance at a party or not, or take revenge on
someone who has wronged her. But unlike the critical decisions you make
in Heavy Rain, Beyond’s choices feel small, and the story will storm
onward no matter how they are played out, never pausing to toss you a
crunchy moral quandary to change its direction in any way that feels
significant. It’s disappointingly unadaptable.
I can illustrate this by comparing two scenarios. In one, Jodie is
preparing for a date: you have the ability to choose her outfit, what
she’ll cook for dinner, if she cleans up her apartment or not, and so
on. How she completes these tasks will affect the outcome of the date.
In another, Jodie is instructed to kill a man. You have no choice in
this.
These restrictions are, of course, understandable from a technical
perspective. Each time Quantic offers us a major decision, there is more
game that must be made to accommodate, plus the developer only had so
much flexibility with a solo protagonist. But it is unwise to build up
our expectations of being able to choose our actions and then take that
away from us where it feels most important.
It should be noted that Beyond’s linearity also extends to general
exploration, but this is an understandable decision on Quantic’s behalf;
opening up its world would cause chaos with Beyond’s tightly scripted
story. You still can bask in the beautifully detailed trappings of
suburbia Quantic has carefully created, or the glistening sterility of a
research base, or the vast desert plains of the Great Southwestern
Nowhere. These stunningly realized backdrops are triumphs of technical
craftsmanship, but they are indeed backdrops, built for looking at
rather than touching; a thought that perhaps encapsulates this game in
its entirety.
The Verdict
Scene by scene, Beyond: Two Souls
is compelling enough, principally thanks to a remarkable performance
from Ellen Page. But never before have I felt like such a passive
participant in a video game, my choices and actions merely icing on a
dense, multi-layered cake. Playing Beyond is a memorable experience,
yes, but a good video game it is not; and while the credits were rolling
I admit to thinking I would have been happier to sit back and watch a
movie version that was eight-and-a-half hours shorter.
CLICK HERE FOR THE DIRECT TORRENT DOWNLOAD FOR THE GAME BEYOND 2 SOULS.
