Geist

"Take possession! Turn enemies against each other! Peek into the ladies' showers!"

To me, first-person shooters are kind of like pizza; even when they're bad, they're still good. I could play a mediocre first-person shooter (example: this game) and still have as much fun as with a great game in a different genre. However, as a shooter, this game is actually pretty bad. Yes, it's in the first person view, and yes, you shoot stuff, but only for about half of the game.

Your character, John Raimi, is a ghost. A malicious experiment is performed on him, and his spirit and body are separated. He has the new found ability to take possession of a variety of things; people, animals, inanimate objects (or: anything in the game that glows red). Thankfully this gives him quite a bit of power to get revenge on those that wronged him. This is the main selling point of Geist; take possession! Turn the enemies against each other! Walk through walls! Sneak into the women's showers and take possession of a shower head to scare all of the ladies! (hey, it was the only way to progress through the game). Throughout the game you are guided by another ghost; a little girl that actually has a semi-compelling back story of her own.

The game has you starting off possessing simple inanimate objects; a paint can here, a mop bucket there. The sole purpose of possessing inanimate objects is to scare humans and animals. You see, you cannot possess someone that isn't scared. It's just not possible. Scare them once, their aura turns yellow. Scare them again, they turn red and are ready for possession. After possession of someone/thing, your view now turns to theirs, as if you really were that person. I like how this is done, especially with objects and animals; if you're a mouse, you see your tiny nose in front of you, if you're a bat, you see your wrings flapping on your side, if you're a mop bucket, you...well...how did they know where a mop bucket's eyes would go anyways? Anyways, a good 50% of the game is spent finding objects to possess and people to scare to progress further. These parts were actually the most fun in the game, in my opinion. One of the cooler puzzles involved getting this woman through a door with a keypad lock, and you don't know the code. Thankfully your ghost self can slip through to the other side, where there is a guard and another keypad. Possess the keypad and make it go on the fritz to get the guard's attention and make him enter the code. Since you are actually looking from the keypad's "view", though, the numbers are reversed and the code is backwards. After you memorize the number, slip back through the door and enter it with the woman, and you're through.

It's those parts of the game that kept me coming back for more. The actual shooting sections were pretty poor. Let's talk about the enemies: dumb. Very dumb. They tried to give it a little variety by adding things like bugs, and bigger bugs, and invisible bugs, and...oh ok well they just added bugs. The bosses, save for the last 3 in the game (which were easily the best) are also bugs, but of course they're very big. And they vary in color. But they all shoot giant balls of energy at you. As for the human enemies, besides being dumb, they were very boring. You might've guessed by now that since you can possess people, some enemies were also possessable, that is if there was a way to scare them. The weapons are very uninteresting, and each person only carries one weapon. So when you possess someone, there is no way to switch to, or even pick up a new weapon (this might be different in multiplayer, I haven't tried it yet). There is no such thing as switching weapons in this game; only switching hosts.

There are other aspects of the game that are annoying or just don't make sense. The first is unlimited ammo (again, I think this is different in multiplayer). That's right, even for your grenade launching secondary fire with some hosts, you have an unlimited supply. Also, you can't fly around with your ghost. You can "float" a bit, but apparently ghosts are mostly bound by the same gravity that pulls everything else down. There are some walls that you can slip through as a ghost, but many that you can't. There are some ghost-proof walls that you cannot get through as a ghost, but you CAN as a human.

There are also completely hokie parts in the storyline, including the token black guy getting swallowed whole by one of the giant bug bosses, which you then proceed to defeat by TOSSING GRENADES IN ITS MOUTH, and after beating him, the guy comes out alive. This same guy later lives after being shot down by a homing missile while on a helicopter.

Basically, the whole possession thing is what makes this game decent. There were some awesome moments, like taking possession of individual grenades and rolling them up to your enemies and exploding them. I will warn that possessing things to progress through the game is very linear; there is always only one correct way to scare someone, and the way you might think to do it will probably often not be how it's done on the game.

I can still walk away saying that it was a decent 7-8 hour game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/25/07