Games like Geist are a rarity: it’s the kind of game that introduces game play elements that have yet to be pulled off successfully. Often times, a great idea becomes a gimmick that developers spend too much time on, neglecting other basic, but infinitely important aspects such as controls, a good storyline, visuals or bugs. Geist is not that game... for the most part.
In Geist, you are John Raimi, a scientist who is charged with the task of infiltrating a top-secret facility run by a company called the Volks Corporation. You are here because the Volks Corporation is suspected of secretly producing a new kind of biological weapon, and it’s your job to either prove or disprove that theory. Unfortunately, things do not go as planned during your extraction, and you end up becoming a part of their “Separation” experiments: for the lack of a better description, they separate your “soul” from your physical body, and then proceed to try to brainwash you into forgetting about your past life so that you can serve as a sort of ethereal assassin. Lucky for you though, your captors run into a stroke of bad luck of their own, and you are somehow freed from your “cell.”
I have to be honest: Geist kicks things off with a pathetic whimper. The intro sequence still has you inside your own body, and you are sent through a series of ridiculously boring 3rd person firefights. In fact, I was ready to stop playing the game I was so disappointed with the beginning of this game. I am however glad I stuck out the first 5 or 10 minutes of play because things really heated up as I smoked the first boss of the game and was captured and “separated” from my physical body. The game literally went from dreadfully boring to highly engaging so fast that I thought my brain would explode from the severe change in pace.
After your escape, you meet up with a “ghost” named Gigi, who was apparently the one who set you free. She holds your hand through a small tutorial to get you acquainted with the games controls and explains a few things to you to help you understand what exactly you have become. Geist’s biggest draw is easily its story, which is original, interesting, and ultimately: entertaining. The beauty of it is that the story and the way you play the game go hand in hand: you couldn’t pull off a story like this unless you created game play elements such as the ones found in Geist.
The game play in Geist is simple. As a ghost, you can possess both inanimate objects and humans, as well as animals such as bats, dogs and rats. The majority of your time will be spent possessing armed guards, which leaves the game with a lot of standard FPS action. But there’s a catch: in order to be able to possess a human, you must first scare the bejeezus out of them by possessing nearby objects (ala The Haunting: Starring Polterguy... you remember that old Genesis game???) to weaken their mental defenses. It can be funny, and even creepy at times. Once their aura turns red, they are ripe for the possessing.
Unfortunately, the FPS elements in Geist are easily its weakest point: I prefer the Gamecubes well-designed controllers to just about anything else out there, but when it comes to FPS’s, they just simply don’t cut it. It’s awfully difficult to be accurate when aiming with that tiny little yellow analog stick. After playing Geist, I am thankful that Retro did not try to attempt the dual-analog control scheme for its Metroid Prime games.
Fortunately, you don’t spend the entire game shooting things, in fact; there are many moments in Geist that are absolutely exhilarating and fresh. One such moment occurred during one of the boss fights: I could wear him down using my possessed guard’s weapons, or I could dodge his shots, wait for him to toss a grenade, dispossess the guard, fly to the grenade, possess it, and then roll it back towards him and detonate the grenade, causing much more damage than a gun could inflict. Situations such as this are what make this game so worthwhile. Often times I forgot that I was really a ghost when inside a human’s body and would be totally stumped until I realized that I could simply leave this body and find another way through. It works very well, and it really is entertaining for the most part.
The graphics in Geist were the dead give-away that Geist wasn’t quite ready to head out the door yet. Compared to some other Gamecube titles, Geist looks awfully PS2-ish, and yet, at other times, looks absolutely gorgeous. Some things such as lighting effects at certain parts of the game are breathtaking, and many of the character models look pretty damn good and even do a good job of showing emotions... and then one of the main characters, the ghost named Gigi looks like a model pulled right out of a 32 bit Playstation game. It’s strange and totally noticeable when you have great looking effects, backgrounds and characters and a really bad looking character model or badly rendered object at the same time: it sticks out like a sore thumb. I also ran into a small handful of clipping issues. At one point, as a ghost, I got stuck inside a boss, and in another instant, I got super-glued to the wall of an elevator trying to dodge enemy fire coming through one of the windows. It was frustrating because both times I was forced to restart the game.
As far as the world in which Geist takes place though, the facility you spend most of your time in is very reminiscent of Shadow Moses from Metal Gear Solid, or the Black Mesa Research Facility in Half Life, and there are times, after certain plot-twists that you will find yourself in a truly interesting and mysterious setting that is creepy in the way that the mansion in the original Resident Evil was. The environments in Geist are easily one of its strongest characteristics graphics-wise.
The sound in Geist is once again, good and bad. The voice acting is done remarkably well... unfortunately, most of the chatter with other characters is displayed in text only. The weapons sound pretty weak too: I was surprised at just how underwhelming the guns sound. Everything else though is pretty good minus a few garbled spots in the sound at key points of the game. There is plenty of ambient music to add to the mood and the music kicks in at all the right moments. Overall, a good job in the sound department, but considering that the little bit of voice acting that is here is so good, I would have liked to see it be done for all of the dialogue rather than just in the cut scenes.
Geist also includes some pretty sweet multiplayer modes to get into. 4-player split screen is supported in full force here and I must say it’s quite a lot of fun to play. I didn’t like that you had to play the 1-player game though to unlock extra maps to play with though: that’s just mean-spirited and unnecessary. I know 32 would definitely frown on this. Otherwise, it’s good fun: possessing and killing your friends makes for a good time, and you can also bring in computer-controlled bots to add to the mayhem.
Overall, I liked Geist. The story coupled with some truly unique game play elements easily pushed me to the very end despite some rather frustrating moments. The controls were rough in spots, the graphics left a bit to be desired in key areas, but in the end it didn’t matter: I was wholly entertained by the roughly 12 hour story mode. If you are looking for something new to play, and you have a Gamecube collecting dust underneath your TV, go ahead and give it a shot: I think you just might enjoy it...
