Geist Review

With Geist, prepare to enter a world that has never really been seen before. Forget traditional FPSs like Halo, Timesplitters and GoldenEye 007, Geist is something in of itself altogether. For as long as gamers can remember, we have played and seen games that would have ghosts or other spectral entities against you and wanting to take you out at any given point in time. Well now the tables have turned and it’s now YOUR turn to take a hack and doing the same to others!

The star of Geist is a bio weapon and disease control specialist by the name of John Raimi. You have been exclusively selected to join a CR-2 counter-terrorism military unit to investigate a shady corporation known as Volks in southern France. Not too long ago, your best friend and mentor who seemed to have gone missing recently was able to get out a transmission to your higher authorities. In the transmission, the words “virus” and “demon” were made out to be understandable. Now obviously you don’t know exactly what that means, but you are about to find out!

Upon infiltrating the Volks corporation with surprising ease, you eventually encounter the rather insanely large lab in which secret experiments are being conducted. You do indeed find your friend as well as the data that you are there to download to your trusty PDA.

But something goes terribly wrong in the process…..

In getting your objective data, the security alarms for the institute go off, and now it’s time to book it! Not everyone in your team will make it to the extraction point, but it doesn’t exactly matter either anyway. Because of some bizarre twist of fate, your team is killed and yourself knocked unconscious. You then find yourself strapped to one insanely huge machine as you witness one of the cruelest acts man could ever do. Your spirit is literally RIPPED from your body!

Why did these people do this to you? Why did they want your spirit? What exactly are they planning to do with this separation machine for the future? These questions will be answered as you now haunt the halls of the Volks Corporation in search of your body…..and answers…..

Geist isn’t exactly the most awe inspiring game out there when it comes to how it presents the beginning of the game to you. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but it also isn’t incredibly boring either. You will first drop down into your area of investigation via helicopter tether cable, and then you are given a small tutorial of basic game elements. Before actually going inside, you are taught all the functions of your D-Pad, which include things like your objectives listing and map display. Once you get to the lab, find your friend and get the data for your PDA, then all heck breaks loose!

Once you reach a certain point in your escape, your commander tells you to whip out your gun since you are definitely going to need it. This is the game’s one and only 9mm pistol so you better enjoy it while it lasts. It is a little weird to see Raimi holding the gun by two hands the whole time, but it’s really not difficult to control.

So the escape progresses, as you take out various members of the Volks security team that are trying to take you out. They aren’t really hard to get rid of, but you have to be careful and use your ducking ability to avoid taking heavy damage. There is one point when your commander utilizes the grenade launching function on his assault rifle, and seeing it more than twice still won’t be enough to stop making you smile!

So simply put, the first half of the beginning mission isn’t anything special or exciting, but escaping adds a bit more spice to the overall tone and feel of the game’s atmosphere.

In terms of how the game actually feels and controls, it really is no different than the mechanics of other FPS games available for the GameCube. If you’ve played the Bond games, the Timesplitter games or any FPS games for that matter, you are pretty well set. You utilize the analog and C-Sticks for all your movement, and it all feels fine. At the beginning there is a chance they might feel stiff to you, but really after not too long it’s hardly noticeable because you’re having so much fun.

There are actually two control schemes to choose from in this game, Shade and Wraith. Both of them really affect your movement controls for the most part instead of the functions of the other face buttons. So depending on how you like the two sticks to function in terms of forward and side-to-side movement along with looking and aiming will determine which scheme you use.

Geist is simply not a hard game to get a hold of. The FPS mechanics are just as easy as other FPSs on the market, and shortly after you become a ghost, you will be given a nice tutorial on your possessing abilities. Both elements are very fun, and learning them is just the same!

In the graphical department, Geist has the capability of really wowing you with how awesome some parts of the game look, while also making you wonder how other parts can look so underdeveloped. Geist is truly a game like no other, and for the most part the graphics are done quite well to accentuate that. The atmosphere when both being a ghostly entity or possessing either a human or animal is really something else.

So let’s start with the aspect that you are bound to be pretty impressed with. Geist is definitely a game that prides itself on having truly awesome looking special effects in terms of the spiritual atmosphere. How you actually see the world and interact with it in spirit form is really just jaw dropping at various points in the game. When you are a ghost, your body is sort of a blue luminescent figure that somehow still looks to have human survival organs on the inside. Your eyes also have an eerie looking glow to them which is also pretty cool.

But how the world around you stands out while navigating in ghost form is truly something else. The area around you will also have a sort of blue tinted glow since your body is derived of the same essence, and you actually move faster than anything else around you that is actually “alive”. This allows you to see just about everything in slow motion until you jam your spirit into something, and that is just really cool.