Beyond Enemy Lines Remastered review

Beyond Enemy Lines Remastered is set in a fictional world where it approaches a nuclear apocalypse and a soviet separatist group captured the control chip of a military satellite. As a nameless soldier, it is your job to recover the chip thanks to state-of-the-art weapons and equipment, you operate in absolute secrecy as a lone wolf far beyond enemy lines.

Beyond Enemy Lines Remastered is an unforgiving, intense FPS experience where you have to rely on skill, stealth, and tactical decisions. If you go in expecting a Call of Duty-like experience, think again. While the developers tried to sell the game so players can go in guns blazing or silent assassin, it’s a blatant lie. A single enemy can f*ck you up within a few seconds before you have time to react. It’s best to approach enemies silently and from behind.

The game features a total of 8 missions which can result in an average of 10 hrs… which will vary greatly because patience is required and obviously, you’ll need to learn enemy placement before being able to blaze through a level. Every time you die, you’re back at the start of the level, which is a poor/frustrating design. If you make your game purposely hard, at least be a bit flexible and include a few checkpoints. Level design is lifeless and boring. Unlike Call of Duty games (or any recent FPS for that matter) where’s constantly something going on-screen, Beyond Enemy Lines Remastered is dead as dead can be. You’d think this was an early beta of an upcoming CoD clone.

On top of the main campaign, the game also features the Operation: Arctic Hawk add-on which adds an additional 4 missions set in the winter. The main upside of this mini-campaign is the fact that the levels are snow-based, enemies are as slightly easier to spot, giving you a chance to get the upper hand. But the design is still pretty bland and boring.

While the game controls like your typical first-person shooters, when you try to aim, instead of holding the trigger to aim, once you press it, it remains in aiming, thankfully with an auto-aim (which can be disabled); it takes a while to get used to, but it also reiterates the fact that it’s better and feels easier to control when you have to hold down the trigger to aim instead of it remaining on at all times. And if you forget to un-aim, your auto-aim keeps targetting the dead body you just killed. Not helpful.

While this all sounds fine and dandy, the levels feel empty and dead. While they are pretty big allowing players to cover a lot of terrain, there’s no life… anywhere. You can spend a good 3-4 minutes walking around trying to figure out where to go and what to do and not see a single enemy soldier on your path. Oh, and you’ll mostly reach the level’s designed borders stopping you dead in your track.

Despite having remastered in its title, does not look remastered at all. It looks like it was a direct port of an early 2000 PC game. There’s not a single redeeming in its presentation; levels look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint, the colors are pretty drab. Some of the most good-looking environments from the game are beyond your reach because they are behind the levels’ invisible walls. The soundtrack is non-existent. There’s enemy banter you need to keep an ear out for so you can avoid being killed by surprise but other than that, it feels like the developers forgot to add any sort of audio.

As I said, it feels like Beyond Enemy Lines Remastered is a very early demo of an upcoming game or a direct port of a 2000 PC game. While relying on stealth for the genre, given the game’s very limited and barebone visuals can sometimes make it difficult to spot enemies before they spot you; which kinda screws up of chances for being stealthy. Fans of Hitman might find some redeemable qualities here, despite the limited arsenal, but fans of action-packed FPS games really should stay clear from this Microsoft Paint look-a-like game.