Coming off of DontNods previous game Vampyr, Banishers takes a lot of the concepts and improves them into a new and unique story but also stumbles on some unnecessary fluff.

Story-wise, following the tale of the banishers Red and Antea is excellent, DontNod kill it with telling an emotional main story as always that lets you choose along the way how to get invested with the community of new Eden and the things that haunt them. Even the optional haunting cases are all great and I recommend doing them to get additional background flavor on supporting characters which make the ending much more impactful.

The missteps are mostly in the combat and the open world. Combat, while initially cool because of the skill tree that Red and Antea share, lacks some depth and towards the end of the game starts feeling button mashy due to a lack of combos. And the open world is beautiful to look at but a lot of double backing and not always the easiest to navigate, sometimes leaving me frustrated that I just wanted to get to the next fast travel point.

Vampyr had a controversial morality system making you choose between killing NPCs for growth but obviously locking yourself out of their quests and effecting which ending you got but not always being clear about the impact. Banishers has its own version of this with letting you act as judge, jury, and even executioner for haunting cases by sacrificing the victims if you so choose, which will impact the ending. I dug this system but can see some people being annoyed with some of the vagueness in consequences and how it might effect which ending you get.

I still appreciate the effort that DontNod took to do their unique form of emotional storytelling and enjoyed the hell out of this game.