28th December 2005, 12:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 28th December 2005, 5:41 PM by Great Rumbler.)
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.
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.
Sometimes you get the scorpion.
