- Ethereal Makeover Needed.I feel sad for Geist, I really do. It's not that it's a bad game, it's actually pretty good. But it could have been so much MORE. Maybe it needed more time in development, maybe it needed a better team. For whatever reason, Geist's potential is clear to see, and while it remains satisfying, it just doesn't live up to it.
STORY: Not horrible. You're John Raimi, and you're having a really bad day. First you get sent in to rescue a friend from an evil corporation and maybe help save the world from its supposed bioweapon. Things go wrong, and you find yourself strapped to a huge machine that splits your spirit from your body. Apparently making ghosts by driving your victims into a frenzy of hate and killing them has gone out of fashion. Guided by a VERY CREEPY little girl ghost named Gigi, you have to figure out what in the world's going on and maybe, you know, get your body back and escape at some point.
Volks, the evil corporation, is pretty much your stereotypical evil corporation meddling with powers that none of them are smart enough to fully comprehend. If I were running a corporation which dealt with ghosts, even only occasionally, I would arm my guards with spirit-detecting equipment and effective weapons. You know how they detect ghosts at Volks?
With dogs.
Dogs that can be possessed.
GAMEPLAY: All right! Where to start?
Geist kind of feels like a quirky mixture between various FPS's. You've got the dorky scientist protagonist (Half-Life) who's friends with a seemingly unkillable black guy (Halo 2) and sneaks around a giant research facility trying to remain undetected (Metal Gear Solid. Yes, I know that's not an FPS) and fights evil soldiers and demons (Doom.)
Naturally, one of the most outstanding features of the game is the fact that you're a disembodied spirit. This means that you can't directly interact with the physical world most of the time. Most people can't see you (though you appear a rather vivid electric blue to yourself) and you can walk (er, float) right through them. What you can do is possess things. Objects are free for possession, and you can make them do unnatural things. You don't get a lot of choice as to what you make the object do, but it's still fun. My favorite one is messing with the cells under a microscope so they spell out DIE. Freaks scientists out like nothing else. Once you've used these abilities to scare the living daylights out of a creature, you can possess that creature. There's something very entertaining about frightening these poor virtual saps who have no idea what's going on.
Animal hosts can typically go places humans can't, while humans have one weapon (if any) and a special action (like running or crouching) apiece. Some hosts are expendable, you can let them die and move on to another, others must be kept from dying (fortunately, health packs are plentiful.) While each host has only a single weapon (sometimes with a secondary feature,) there's a fair amount of variety among hosts. Some weapons are the best you can find (ratchet gun,) other are ordinary (assault rifle.) More exotic guns do eventually appear: spirit-hunter guns and weapons made from materials most.... unorthodox.
The game has a noteable horror overtone (made ironic by the fact that the most prominent ghost is you, but I mean besides hauntings caused by the player.). The creepy old house you wander through at one point is spooky in a very classical way.
While there is a lot of stuff you can possess, I think the game would have been vastly improved if it gave greater freedom over what is possessable and allowed you to improvise your own ways to scare things.
One point of major lameness: When fighting a boss monster, the life-bar at the top of the screen almost invariably reads "Creature" or "Boss" rather than giving it a name. When you do find out the names of creatures, they're always something trite like "imp" or "hydra," or worst of all "tentacle monster." The names don't even fit the monsters particularly well (Geist's hydras have only one head each.)
VIOLENCE: Mild
While you will end up wiping out a significant percentage of Volks Corps. Employees, the violence in this game is not particularly harsh or graphic (with one exception towards the beginning.) Enemies just die, sometimes with an amusing line like "Aw, crap!" There's a lot of focus on sneaking around and remaining undetected, either as an invisible ghost or making your host body act "natural". You CAN usually wipe out everybody you see, but it's generally not a good idea. It's still not a game I'd give to an eight-year-old.
The "partial nudity" mentioned on the box is deserved; you do sneak into the womens' shower at one point, though towels and convenient bubbles guard the occupants from ethereal voyeurism. Not that the women are especially attractive polygons, see below.
GRAPHICS: Eww! The graphics would have been impressive maybe two or three years ago. It's just sad that they couldn't do better than these flat-faced avatars whose mouths don't move except in cutscenes. The most impressive images in the game are likely the final boss (very pretty) and Raimi himself, who's really very blue for being invisible.
MUSIC: Eh. Whatever.
MULTIPLAYER: Weird. That can be good or bad. They're a bit slower paced than most other FPS multiplayer modes. You've got Host Deathmatch (where you swap bodies instead of getting new guns,) Capture the Host (steal a host and take it to base) and Sprit Hunting (Ghost Vs. Host, the host shoots the ghost with a special and extremely slow gun while the ghost tries to lead the host into a trap.) Some will like it, but I don't think most folks will.
VERDICT: Geist is all right. It could seriously use a makeover, touch up the graphics, better the music, focus the gameplay more on possession and doing strange things with objects (even if they're useless.) If you can find it fairly cheap and are willing to try something new, give it a shot. If you want another cookie-cutter style just-kill-everything shooter, look someplace else.
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