Tendo City

As a first-person shooter, Geist fails for several reasons. The aiming system is broken, enemy AI is almost non-existent, you have an unlimited amount of ammo, and you only spend about 1/3 of the game with a gun. The reason Geist succeeds is because it isn't, stricly speaking, a true first-person shooter. Most of your time is spent solving puzzles and using your ghostly powers to move ahead rather than blasting everything that shows up in front of you.

The graphics in Geist aren't anything great, in fact it is often rather sub-par compared to other recent console games. However, it has a nice attention to detail and a decent art design that keeps the overall look of the game from suffering too much due to lacking technicals.

The controls don't work too well during shootouts since the aiming is hard to work properly, but the shooting aspect of the game is very muted and aside from a few places and some boss battles you won't spend much time concentrating on the downsides of the controls. For everything else it works just fine.

Were Geist really shines is in the gameplay. You constantly have to stop and think about your next move: what person [or animal] you'll need to get to the next area and how you're going to scare them enough to make use of them. If it weren't for this part of the game, Geist would just be another below-average shooter. With it however, Geist is a game that has it's flaws, but when it focuses on what it does best, it can be a lot of fun.

Don't let the low reviews frighten you away from this game. Once I figured out how it worked, I started having a lot of fun.

That's pretty much how I viewed it too, the mechanics in the multiplayer is also alot of fun with 4 players.

If you read EGM's review, you'd think it was one of the worst games this generation. :/

Quote:the mechanics in the multiplayer is also alot of fun with 4 players.

I haven't had a chance to play multi yet, but I've heard it's really good.

Yeah it's definitely not pretty and often it's clunky but it's still an above average game if just for the mechanics of the ghosting.

The multiplayer is really fun and puts a whole new spin on FPS games, plus there's a ton of unlockables like odd characters and the like. I think my favorite was... shit I forget the name... you'll know it when you play it; You have to take a hold of a host and then 'capture the host' and go find a new one. While in a host you have the ability to shoot of course so you can stop other ghosts from capturing their hosts and well, it gets really hectic and suddenly someone's a bat and then some ass finds the rocket launcher right before you score.

My friend and I came up with a theory that this game was designed as a multiplayer game first and then had a single player aspect tacked on later in dev.