You know turning the valves in the U-boat isn't going to be more fun than pretending to be a janitor in the Nazi facility (you have to bend down and pick up trash to blend in), but you still want to check it out. It's like wandering between lavish but disappointing interactive museum exhibits. It isn't more fun than any other on-rails tank combat level- look at Panzerschreck guys, shoot them with the machine gun-but after defeating a Tiger tank you're off to do something totally different. When you climb into a tank, for instance, the cannon follows the center of your vision, and it feels as if you've become the tank. But some are stupid in a fun sort of way. No scene is totally successful, and there are some real stinkers: infiltrating a Nazi base by walking around with a box of papers, a dreadful nautical stealth segment, an underwater bit where you have to wave your arms to swim (just awful), a scene where you shoot down planes that just kind of get stuck in the ocean when they crash (this whole scene is bizarrely janky). With so much variety, there's some enjoyment to be had just from seeing how the devs approached each scenario. Just the number of landscapes produced for this game is a hell of an accomplishment. Outside, there are some stunning vistas, and an incredible number of distinct scenes and set pieces. I did enjoy the scenery a good deal, especially some of the interiors, which are filthy with little details, like books and pamphlets and newspapers-I wouldn't have accepted anything less, since the damn game devours 180GB of disk space. (I used the built-in Oculus Rift headphones.) Even the ping of a spent M1 Garand clip is hard to hear.
For how much I had to think about reloading, it's not very satisfying. The magazines don't snap to their slots in the satisfying way they do in Half-Life: Alyx, though. It's fun in moments, but most of the challenge is remembering to stock up on ammo and reloading as speedily as possible-I was almost always thinking about ammo. There wasn't much time to awkwardly aim down the sights of my M1 Garands or Gewehr 43s, then, so I shot from the hip and relied on tracer bullets and generous hitboxes to clear out enemies as fast as I could, skating around with the analog stick on my left Oculus Touch controller.
Sometimes I'd pop out of cover and almost instantly everything would go echoey and red to warn me I was taking too much fire-some of the Nazis are absolute lasers with their rifles. (Amusingly, though, you can come unstuck and have an out-of-body experience, turning around to see your own headless torso.)Ībove and Beyond isn't always more enjoyable when the shooting starts. Sometimes it even glues you in place so that all you can do is stand and listen. In those moments, it feels like I'm being punished by the teacher for not paying attention during class. When it's being cruel, Above and Beyond makes you restart a scene because you 'blew your cover' by messing around and shooting at the floor. Admittedly, that means I'm judging with an incomplete experience of the dialogue, because a lot of it went like: "There are things that I'm willing to sacrifice myself for." I got the gist, though, and it's all the usual boring suspects: clean-cut American good guys, a plucky British teenager, some French resistance fighters. I threw props around, and if it let me, plunked holes into my surroundings with my pistols and rifles and submachine guns.
When it's being merciful, Above and Beyond at least lets you goof off during its weirdly-paced dialogue scenes (lots of long pauses). You can come unstuck and have an out-of-body experience, turning around to see your own headless torso.
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