Beyond Good & Evil 2

Ubisoft’s long-awaited prequel still needs a lot of time

- Phil Savage

Between the CGI trailer and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s boyish face, Ubisoft’s E3 conference made Beyond Good & Evil 2 feel impossibly ambitious. A seamless, shared world space opera taking place across a solar system – can such a game even exist? Having seen a 30-minute behind-closed-doors demo, I don’t think it does. Not yet.

To be clear, I’m not saying BG&E2 won’t become what Ubisoft says it will, just that the road from what I saw to what it claims seems long.

The demo begins in a forgotten temple in Ganesha, a city in the New Indian continent of the moon Soma. In Beyond Good & Evil 2’s world, the people are infertile, and can only populate the world by cloning the DNA of the first settlers. Everyone is a clone, basically, which means the character you generate will be picked from a DNA profile – with individuality expressed instead through clothing customisation and fighting style.