Geist

"The game you’ve been waiting for since Goldeneye!"

In the summer of 2005, Gamecube owner's dreams finally came true. After more than three years in development, Geist was finally available to the public. Developed by N-Space who is most popular for creating games like Duke Nukem teamed up with Nintendo to create an innovative masterpiece. Geist combines an innovative adventurous game packed with first person shooting.

Story: 9/10

You are Raimi that is part of a special operations group. Your mission was to extract an undercover agent and some viral material from the Volks corporation. As you are being extracted, a friendly soldier is possessed and kills all of the remaining squad, including you. Your then used as an experiment which goes wrong and your spirit is let loose. You find out that the undercover agent is alive from a computer file. Your mission is now to rescue the agent and escape alive.

Gameplay: 10/10

Geist gives off a horrible first impression because in the beginning of the game there is a massive shootout and the enemy A.I. is easy to kill because they don't use cover. Your character also doesn't take alot of damage from shots. This all changes when you become a ghost. As a ghost, to live and bypass areas you must possess humans and animals. To possess something you must scare it. You can scare it by taking control of computers, statues, trashcans, and more. You can make the object (depending on what it is) shake, explode, or shut down. Once the enemy is scared enough the aura around him will turn red which means his is able to be possessed. The cool thing about fighting bosses is that the developers made the bosses old school. So, just like in older games you just have to analyze the enemy for certain mysterious traits. You will usually die a couple of times while fighting a boss before you figure out the weakness.

Multiplayer: 10/10

Multiplayer is a major part in Geist. In multiplayer, you must posses a character to use his abilities. So, all around the map there are characters that spawn with different weapons. So, you could possess weapons with machine guns, mines, sub- machines, shotguns, assault rifles, rocket launchers, and sniper rifles. There are also many power-ups to enhance your game play. You can also possess turrets and explosive crates, which are fun to use if you like to surprise your friends. There are three modes, deathmatch, hunt, and capture the host. Capture the host is a game where you possess hosts and you most drop the points of at a base without being killed. You can earn extra points by killing enemies before you go to the base. Hunt is where ghost must posses the host and make them go into hazardous areas to lose lives. Host can kill the ghost by using anti-ghost weapons. Sadly, there is no online play, but you can add up to seven bots (depending on how many human players are in the game) that are actually pretty hard to be play against. The multiplayer in Geist is very similar to Goldeneye because they both have the same pace and the map design is exactly the same too.

Sound: 7/10

The sound is not that great. Most characters only say one word of dialogue and the rest is text. The music also gets repetitive. The weapon sounds also seem muffled most of the time.

Graphics: 8/10

Overall the graphics look great except for some minor problems. Occasionally, the graphics can look like Nintendo 64 graphics for some odd reason. This happens mostly during the cut scenes though. The coolest part of the graphics are when you stop shooting a thin puff of smoke will come out from the weapon. Oddly there haven't been any frame rate problems for me. The game has run extremely smooth and I haven't seen any major graphical problems.

Controls: 10/10

If you play first person shooters like Halo, the controls should be very similar. You use the analog stick to move and the c-stick to turn and look up or down. The controls are very responsive and are not clunky at all.

Replay Value: 9/10

The replay value in this game is a great for many reasons. The game is very fun to re-play a couple of times because the game never gets old because of how you can possess people. It's also fun reading every document that you find to learn more about the story. And if you like to complete games fully, there is also a percentage in the menu that shows how many documents you've read. There is collectibles that you can find all around the game. Most of them are hidden in tunnels and vents. This collectibles unlock new hosts and maps for multiplayer games.

Overall: 9/10

I recommend this game to anyone that owns a Game cube because this is a unique experience for everyone and the multiplayer has that Golden eye type feeling to it which ensures fun, even when you finish the game. That there is still more to the package than you may of thought there was.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/17/05, Updated 08/19/05