The Beyond: Two Souls demo is currently available for free on the PlayStation network to download and check out the game. If you haven’t been sure about Beyond: Two Souls yet, I highly recommend trying out the demo because Beyond: Two Souls is a very impressive game.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lnoRl7HJik[/youtube]
The Demo for the game doesn’t give away much details about the story other than a bit of a view of 3 of the scenes in the game. One is playing as young Jodi, one to familiarize you with the combat and one long scene where you’re escaping from the police. You get to try out playing as Jodi and Aiden in the demo and see what some of the basic gameplay of the Beyond: Two Souls is like.
In my view I really enjoyed the gameplay in this game. The combat scenes weren’t difficult, but you needed to look at where Jodi was moving on screen and attack in the direction she was aiming to hit or dodge attacks to execute the moves properly. I found that if succeeding each time, the game moved quick much like a movie. But you could also mess up your moves and it would change what was happening on screen. Playing as Aiden was also interesting in that you fly around and move objects using the analog sticks to try help Jodi out. Aiden is easy to control although the buttons took me a moment to get used to, once you have them down though, gameplay wise the game isn’t difficult.
What is really interesting about the gameplay is its mix with the storytelling in Beyond: Two Souls. You can mess up the scenes completely and you sort of keep continuing the story (some spoilers in this paragraph). In the demo there is a train scene where the police are looking for you. There are multiple ways Jodi’s train escape can go. One time I went out above some ceiling gap in the bathroom, one time through the side window and one time I was arrested. All of which I reached the same end point in the story which was escaping the police via the motorcycle. But it seems depending on how you played out each scene, determined how you got to the end point.
Like Heavy Rain I imagine there might be consequences or benefits for different paths depending on what information you need, but I can’t gather that from the demo. There is definitely as very interesting mix between gameplay and story telling and the player is in control of what is happening to the story. Beyond: Two Souls feels very interactive in the way the story is told and it will be interesting to see how it is in the final product.
Moving away from the gameplay, what was most impressive to me from playing the demo preview of Beyond: Two Souls was the high level of detail and the level of graphics this game has on the PS3. The game looks stunning and the characters look incredibly realistic. What stood out to me the most was when looking at the characters eyes they were very real and detailed. In many games if you look at the eyes of the character’s they look fake or crazy even. But in Beyond: Two Souls there is a lot of realism to the characters. Likely due to the amount of effort during the motion capture process which sounds intense (click here to watch it). While the actors from what I saw appeared to have incredibly strong performances for a video game especially Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, from the short scenes I was shown.
What also seemed impressive about Beyond: Two Souls was the soundtrack and sound design in this game that goes along with the story and the gameplay. I think the Beyond: Two Souls soundtrack will definitely be something special and is actually composed by Lorne Balfe who also composed the soundtrack for Assassins Creed III along with being produced by Hans Zimmer who most would know from the Nolan Batman trilogy films. The soundtrack really stands out strongly in the demo and seems very memorable and powerful for the type of story Quantic Dream is trying to tell.
Overall the demo is quite short, but it’s a good preview for those unsure still about the game. Beyond: Two Souls is a very impressive game with regards to sound, graphics and storytelling it’s really superb. Its gameplay is interesting and different. It’s not something you get from many games that come out at all, Beyond: Two Souls definitely something that looks special.
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