LarryDavis
Ghostwire: Tokyo 2022
Log Status
Abandoned
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
--
Days in Journal
1 day
Last played
April 28, 2022
Platforms Played
I love everything about Ghostwire: Tokyo, except for actually playing it.
The game has massive Vibes, and feels almost like a first-person action spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei. The blend of supernatural elements and technology is interesting (transferring spirits via payphone devices is very SMT), and the art design is top-notch. The story is good enough, following a guy who is brought back from death by a spirit that co-inhabits his body. There's nothing incredible there, but the banter between the two can be entertaining.
It's unfortunate, then, that everything else doesn't live up to the game's style. The combat, where you launch various projectiles via hand-signs, looks pretty, but has no sense of impact. Your default "rapid-fire" attack, Air, particularly feels like an ineffective peashooter. Water is far more useful, being the equivalent of a shotgun, and Fire is your "rocket launcher". They can all be upgraded, but that's another issue...
See, almost every upgrade only exists to make the game feel slightly less sluggish. Normally, when you damage enemies enough, you can rip their cores out to finish them. You don't actually have to, but it gives you some ammo back. Kind of like a Glory Kill from DOOM or something. The problem is that enemies can interrupt this animation. So the game's solution? Give you a bunch of upgrades that make it faster. Or give you other core-ripping abilities that can't be interrupted. My solution? Just stop doing it and hit them a couple more times to kill them.
Other upgrades are similar: higher rate of fire. Slightly wider splash damage radius. It's all very incremental and feels like a waste of time. That's appropriate, though, because most of this game feels like a waste of time. If it had simply been a straight-ahead, linear first-person action game, the combat's flaws could be more easily overlooked. However, because More Hours = Better Than, the fine folks at Tango Gameworks (or, speculating, their parent company Bethesda) decided this should be an open world game with copy-pasted sidequests and, uh... 250,000 spirits scattered around the map to absorb.
Yeah. 250,000. Sure, those are in bundles of, like, 100-300 at a time, but holy cow, that's still a LOT of things to absorb!
And then, if all that wasn't bad enough, there are segments of the game where you're separated from your Ghost Man, so you have none of your shitty little magics, and instead have to rely on the Very Good™ stealth.
I liked talking to the Tanuki. They were cool.
The game has massive Vibes, and feels almost like a first-person action spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei. The blend of supernatural elements and technology is interesting (transferring spirits via payphone devices is very SMT), and the art design is top-notch. The story is good enough, following a guy who is brought back from death by a spirit that co-inhabits his body. There's nothing incredible there, but the banter between the two can be entertaining.
It's unfortunate, then, that everything else doesn't live up to the game's style. The combat, where you launch various projectiles via hand-signs, looks pretty, but has no sense of impact. Your default "rapid-fire" attack, Air, particularly feels like an ineffective peashooter. Water is far more useful, being the equivalent of a shotgun, and Fire is your "rocket launcher". They can all be upgraded, but that's another issue...
See, almost every upgrade only exists to make the game feel slightly less sluggish. Normally, when you damage enemies enough, you can rip their cores out to finish them. You don't actually have to, but it gives you some ammo back. Kind of like a Glory Kill from DOOM or something. The problem is that enemies can interrupt this animation. So the game's solution? Give you a bunch of upgrades that make it faster. Or give you other core-ripping abilities that can't be interrupted. My solution? Just stop doing it and hit them a couple more times to kill them.
Other upgrades are similar: higher rate of fire. Slightly wider splash damage radius. It's all very incremental and feels like a waste of time. That's appropriate, though, because most of this game feels like a waste of time. If it had simply been a straight-ahead, linear first-person action game, the combat's flaws could be more easily overlooked. However, because More Hours = Better Than, the fine folks at Tango Gameworks (or, speculating, their parent company Bethesda) decided this should be an open world game with copy-pasted sidequests and, uh... 250,000 spirits scattered around the map to absorb.
Yeah. 250,000. Sure, those are in bundles of, like, 100-300 at a time, but holy cow, that's still a LOT of things to absorb!
And then, if all that wasn't bad enough, there are segments of the game where you're separated from your Ghost Man, so you have none of your shitty little magics, and instead have to rely on the Very Good™ stealth.
I liked talking to the Tanuki. They were cool.