BEYOND ENEMY LINES REMASTERED EDITION FULL
BEYOND ENEMY LINES REMASTERED EDITION PLUS

Beyond Enemy Lines, by taking the stealthy-stealthy approach, doesn’t allow you to brute-force all of its issues. That’s largely because it took the Rambo-route: enemies were fodder for you to chew through, and you merrily wandered through the jungle, tossing grenades and watching terrorists arcing over your head. For all of its haphazard brokenness, its charmless presentation, it was at least possible to play it. When we reviewed Strike Force 2: Terrorist Hunt, we at least ploughed through to the end. Bugs, AI and level design just take it beyond human reach. What’s the opposite of ‘Remastered’? Demastered? FUBAR’d? Needless to say, we found Beyond Enemy Lines impossible to complete, and we tried. Here we go, it was as fruitful as we hoped: we looked down our scope but couldn’t move it left or right an enemy fired through a window that we couldn’t fire through, and then got stuck in a door that he couldn’t fire through but we could we looked at our objectives, but couldn’t get rid of the objectives screen the objective screen is increasingly flickering and might well explode (send help) and all of the objectives are visible on the map apart from objective 3, which has done a runner. For a bit of hilarity, we’ve just paused the review and jumped into the game for one English minute, with the aim of writing down each and every bug we encounter. It may well be we’re not sure what’s intent and what’s just a catastrophic game error.

Of course, another explanation is that the game is broken.

BEYOND ENEMY LINES REMASTERED EDITION FULL

There’s no need for alternate routes, alarms or guard dogs in your game when the main character has a musky aroma that wakes a full barracks. They know you’re there the moment you wander into the vicinity.

We’d be surprised that there’s no melee takedown, but then we remembered that it’s not possible to actually surprise the AI.

BEYOND ENEMY LINES REMASTERED EDITION PLUS

There are virtually no health packs and there’s no health regen, plus death… wait for it… sends you back to the start of the entire level, with the added bonus of watching the cutscenes! It’s enough to make you renounce your calling as a games reviewer. Go to town, soldier! Enemies, when they actually see you (and getting in their faces with a shotgun is precisely one of the ways to get attention), are unerringly accurate and will down you in seconds. Well, you could press RB to switch over to the shotgun and see if you could take them down at close quarters, but – hoho, you won’t see this coming! – your shotgun fires one shell at a time, the reload is long enough to boil an egg, and it does barely any damage. You’re not given any other tools for crowd control. There really is no alternative to this approach. Then roll a dice to see if shotgun-man appears from nowhere and kills you almost instantly. Once the coast is clear, you wander in and play the game of ‘did they drop enough bullets to make up for what I just sprayed at them?’. Then the next soldier, then the next, as they stand there, wondering who is giving them a particularly forceful massage. You stand far enough away from enemies that they can’t see you or shoot you (chalk that up to the bizarro AI), and you fire through your scope with the hope of doing enough damage before your bullets run out. So, what do you do in a stealth game that’s near-completely linear and full of enemies? Why, you cheese it of course! The opening warning didn’t mention that one. Any best-laid plans will get tossed to the wayside when enemies behave like a drunk version of Vision from the MCU.

The AI has one setting, and that setting is ‘do random crap’, which unfortunately means seeing through walls and firing through walls. You can get your ghilly on and saunter up to a compound, moving slowly and ducking into foliage, but – whoopsy daisy – a Russian voice will pipe up and start juggling you with bullets. You can’t stealth in Beyond Enemy Lines because, let’s be honest, Beyond Enemy Lines doesn’t really want you to stealth. You can probably see where this is going. Alarms and whatnot to both switch off and be wary of. A melee button, so you can takedown enemies with barely a whisper. Levels that have places to hide, and alternate routes where you can bypass those enemies. The ability to hide, right? Enemies that can be hidden from.

Now, here’s an exercise: start thinking about the things that are essential for a good stealth game. “Stealth is vital in Beyond Enemy Lines”, says the welcoming screen, which reads more like an apology in hindsight.

Beyond enemy lines remastered edition