Geist Preview

Earlier this afternoon, I had the opportunity to play a demo of the upcoming FPS from n-Space and Nintendo in Geist! It happened to be one of the featured games on a demo collection disk for a GameCube at my local Game Crazy, and I was stoked to see it! I’ve been wanting this game ever since it was first announced and described, and the following will tell you of my hands-on experience with it!

There were two available missions on the demo that I had the chance to play. One I’m guessing was the very beginning of the game which had John Raimi and his military support team infiltrate the shady Volks Corporation. The other I will get to shortly.

Watching the opening cutscene was pretty cool. The graphics were fairly well-done even though some textures appeared a bit blurry, and the character models were quite nicely detailed. Now I don’t know if what I saw is going to be in the final product, but if it is, I will tell you right now don’t expect any kind of graphics that are as polished as the Halo games. No that doesn’t mean the graphics suck, because they really don’t. I would probably consider the presentation that I saw great. Not excellent but not poor enough to just be “good.” Some parts of the missions I played looked incredible, while others suffered from lack of elaborate detail.

So anyway, to get to the first mission, it was fairly entertaining. It started out with you coming in via helicopter and being briefed about your mission by some unknown person. It was probably someone of higher authority, and he does a good job explaining your objectives. You are to first find an undercover operative of your team that infiltrated the corporation recently and find out what’s going on with him. He apparently sent out a garbled transmission to your officers and in it they are able to make out the words “virus” and “demon.”

You eventually descend into the area with your aiding military team via tether cable and begin your initial infiltration of the Volks Corporation. You will trek through various rooms and cool looking doors until you end up in the building’s main lab. Here is where you basically hold up all the present scientists doing various experiments in there as you end up finding your missing comrade!

When you finally meet up with this guy, he tells you where the information you are seeking is. It’s basically a download that you will put onto your handy PDA that shows a freaky looking virus the scientists have apparently been experimenting with. It’s actually pretty cool to watch Raimi take a cable from his PDA and plug it into a port on the contraption that holds the information you need.

But of course, you are sneaking into a corporation that obviously does not want you there! Just about as soon as you download your information, the security alarms go off. This is basically the cue for your team to get the heck out of there! Once you leave the main lab, you go to a different area in which the man you found tells you to bust out the gun you have on you! It’s a standard 9 mm pistol, but it looks REALLY sweet. Now I would be lying if I said the actual controls (with or w/o a weapon) aren’t somewhat stiff when you first begin playing. But after a while you really get used to how the guy actually moves and it doesn’t become too much of a hassle.

So the Volks security is obviously after you, and you will have to make use of the “duck” to make sure you aren’t completely pwned right off the bat. A lot of window glass will shatter and a lot of gunfire will ensue. These security guys really aren’t entirely difficult to take out, and even if you happen to take more hits than you wish, there are medical kits on the wall ready for your taking!

Eventually you come to a bridge that an officer and the guy that you found make their way across. But unfortunately for the officer, there is a nice freaky looking monster in the huge ceiling pipe that comes down, sends a nasty claw through his chest, and then bites his head off! So of course to proceed in the mission, you have to take this monster down. He really isn’t that difficult, it just sucks that you’re the only one that can attack him since the only vulnerable part of his body is his mouth. He’s only facing towards you, so there’s nothing the guy you found can do about it since he’s on the other side! He does launch random energy projectiles from his mouth, but even a direct hit won’t hurt you that badly. After about five minute or so, you will defeat it because his health does not go down quickly!

You will eventually get through a few areas that will take you back to the “extraction point” where the chopper is waiting to get you out of there. But that’s when something goes terribly wrong. The game shifts to another cutscene in which you are now watching the view of what appears to be some kind of ghost, and it possesses one of the members of your very team! Unfortunately your team doesn’t realize this has happened to the poor fellow until it’s too late. He takes out every remaining member of the team, and then simply knocks you unconscious!

The game then shifted to another cutscene with John Raimi shirtless and bound to some kind of freaky loo contraption that is obviously going to be used to separate him from his bodily spirit. But in a sort of “teaser”, the demo reset itself before you could watch that process initiate!

So after the game reset, I chose to take a shot at the next available mission, which basically happens after your spirit is ripped from your body. You will watch a cutscene with a rather deformed looking man in a futuristic looking wheelchair and a member of his team that wished to “pop” you rather than keep you for the ’separation experiments.’