Ghostwire: Tokyo feels like a game without direction. While the reasons for this are not public one might take a few guesses at the departure of game director Ikumi Nakamura and the Bethesda acquisition as playing some part. From start to finish Ghostwire spins its wheels on a broad ghost fighting concept that never truly comes together.
Ghostwire just seems brimming with questionable choices when there might be a better product buried in here had other choice been made. Chief among these choices is the open world design. An open world design demands content with a capital C. Ghostwire has content, but is most of it worth a damn? Not really no. Time and time again it degrades at the “spooky” elements of the game with the same enemies in the same environments that you have seen a few dozen times over. The action focus makes these enemies trivial after the first few battles and tedious a while after that. A shame considering some of these enemy designs are genuinely off putting, but hardly scary when fought at distance in the open streets. The game always at its strongest in the constrained sections where the art design shines, and the freedom of the open world is ripped away.
The streets of Shibuya are empty, the most you will ever see of its residents blue floating spirits. This could elevate the scare factor, being alone with no one to turn to, but in practice it clears the world of tension. We are to be Tokyo’s savior and yet at no point in the game’s entire story do we interact with a living resident of Tokyo. Instead, you get to complete meaningless fetch quests or stumble across rooftops and alleyways to suck up their spirits into katashiro. With 240,000+ spirits to collect you would spend more time with them than playing the main story three times over. For as well realized as Shibuya is, there isn’t anything compelling you to explore these streets any further than you must.
The moment-to-moment gameplay is novel enough to support itself. The magic system is interesting, and each element is independent enough to offer some good moments of fighting to set it apart from most first-person action games that centralize on guns and swords. The core extraction feature, in particular, is simple, engaging, and feels satisfying to pull off. Ghostwire builds a small, if incredibly simple, combat system that feels good which is something to its benefit for certain.
Character upgrades in particular feel half baked. Again, as if to fulfill a mark on a game design doc the game has a few sets of skill trees that unlock little more than carrying capacity and speed boosts. If the skill is to be a smidge faster in charging an attack, that skill is ineffective at altering how you will continue playing the game. Skills in any game should offer a balance between opening new ways to play and creating synergies between the abilities you have. Ghostwire is far from the only game to fall short in this regard, but again it further disincentivizes any exploration or player growth. When the game marks its own minigames with a “Hold X to Auto-Complete” you just get a sense of doubt about the fundamental design of the game systems.
In practice most will likely find themselves following the straight lines (opened by clearing fog of the Tori gates) from story mission to story mission until their time with Ghostwire is at its end. If anything, the game demands you do nothing but. Often when you send off spirits while collecting your sister will psychically reach out in pain and beg you for aid.
The whole narrative thread is that your sister Mari is the lynchpin in the villainous Hannya’s strategy. As an aside, that isn’t his name, just the name of the mask he wears. You never learn anything meaningful about him as a person (the game even teases an unmasking that could never amount to anything which is baffling as they reveal KK’s body as one of the other masked henchmen). One more aside, this game has some of the worst lip-sync I have seen in a AAA game in some time and I don’t understand it.
For most of the narrative you are chasing after this one man with a vague sense of an evil master plan. It’s hardly the most compelling hook. Still, the game offers a nice relationship between protagonist Akito and the spirit KK. They have a very typical buddy-cop partnership. Beginning at odds they begrudgingly find common ground and leave one another by the credits rolls as friends. They have good banter and keep the game lively—in spite of its emptiness. Their relationship is the singular saving grace of this game’s narrative. It works and that is enough to support its short length.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is a contradiction of a game. In theory a spooky successor to Tango’s Evil Within it falls well short of the horror mold. It offers a big open world and different magic systems for a game with more action than anything else. Shibuya is a well realized and lovingly built world but lacking any life within. KK and Akito make a good pairing but have little to bounce off of. It is always a damn shame when a game shows promise but falls short of it. Especially when you get the sense that this is the only visit to this world and its concepts. Although a game with a good core, it is a core put into a game structure that works against it.
Ghostwire just seems brimming with questionable choices when there might be a better product buried in here had other choice been made. Chief among these choices is the open world design. An open world design demands content with a capital C. Ghostwire has content, but is most of it worth a damn? Not really no. Time and time again it degrades at the “spooky” elements of the game with the same enemies in the same environments that you have seen a few dozen times over. The action focus makes these enemies trivial after the first few battles and tedious a while after that. A shame considering some of these enemy designs are genuinely off putting, but hardly scary when fought at distance in the open streets. The game always at its strongest in the constrained sections where the art design shines, and the freedom of the open world is ripped away.
The streets of Shibuya are empty, the most you will ever see of its residents blue floating spirits. This could elevate the scare factor, being alone with no one to turn to, but in practice it clears the world of tension. We are to be Tokyo’s savior and yet at no point in the game’s entire story do we interact with a living resident of Tokyo. Instead, you get to complete meaningless fetch quests or stumble across rooftops and alleyways to suck up their spirits into katashiro. With 240,000+ spirits to collect you would spend more time with them than playing the main story three times over. For as well realized as Shibuya is, there isn’t anything compelling you to explore these streets any further than you must.
The moment-to-moment gameplay is novel enough to support itself. The magic system is interesting, and each element is independent enough to offer some good moments of fighting to set it apart from most first-person action games that centralize on guns and swords. The core extraction feature, in particular, is simple, engaging, and feels satisfying to pull off. Ghostwire builds a small, if incredibly simple, combat system that feels good which is something to its benefit for certain.
Character upgrades in particular feel half baked. Again, as if to fulfill a mark on a game design doc the game has a few sets of skill trees that unlock little more than carrying capacity and speed boosts. If the skill is to be a smidge faster in charging an attack, that skill is ineffective at altering how you will continue playing the game. Skills in any game should offer a balance between opening new ways to play and creating synergies between the abilities you have. Ghostwire is far from the only game to fall short in this regard, but again it further disincentivizes any exploration or player growth. When the game marks its own minigames with a “Hold X to Auto-Complete” you just get a sense of doubt about the fundamental design of the game systems.
In practice most will likely find themselves following the straight lines (opened by clearing fog of the Tori gates) from story mission to story mission until their time with Ghostwire is at its end. If anything, the game demands you do nothing but. Often when you send off spirits while collecting your sister will psychically reach out in pain and beg you for aid.
The whole narrative thread is that your sister Mari is the lynchpin in the villainous Hannya’s strategy. As an aside, that isn’t his name, just the name of the mask he wears. You never learn anything meaningful about him as a person (the game even teases an unmasking that could never amount to anything which is baffling as they reveal KK’s body as one of the other masked henchmen). One more aside, this game has some of the worst lip-sync I have seen in a AAA game in some time and I don’t understand it.
For most of the narrative you are chasing after this one man with a vague sense of an evil master plan. It’s hardly the most compelling hook. Still, the game offers a nice relationship between protagonist Akito and the spirit KK. They have a very typical buddy-cop partnership. Beginning at odds they begrudgingly find common ground and leave one another by the credits rolls as friends. They have good banter and keep the game lively—in spite of its emptiness. Their relationship is the singular saving grace of this game’s narrative. It works and that is enough to support its short length.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is a contradiction of a game. In theory a spooky successor to Tango’s Evil Within it falls well short of the horror mold. It offers a big open world and different magic systems for a game with more action than anything else. Shibuya is a well realized and lovingly built world but lacking any life within. KK and Akito make a good pairing but have little to bounce off of. It is always a damn shame when a game shows promise but falls short of it. Especially when you get the sense that this is the only visit to this world and its concepts. Although a game with a good core, it is a core put into a game structure that works against it.