M:B #9 Geist

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for shooters that sport a unique gameplay feature but are average otherwise. Dark Sector had a glaive that you could throw for slow motion decapitations, but the levels themselves were fairly boring even if they looked nice. Army of Two featured great cooperative play with its aggro feature, but the enemies weren't particularly challenging and, once again, the level design wasn't interesting (I'm beginning to think a lot of games that fall into this sub-sub-genre could benefit a lot from a better level designer). I also know that in the future I'm doomed to play certain games once I can find them for under five dollars (Haze, Fracture, Psi Ops, Dark Void, and that's without looking in a bargain bin to remind myself of others). All I had heard about Geist was that it featured a body possession mechanic in which you weren't forced to play through the game as any one character, but rather had to change bodies as the situation dictated. I also knew that it had ended up with reviews in the low 7s, but as previously mentioned that has never kept me from wanting to play a game as long as it had a twist. And yet when I purchased Geist, I almost immediately put it on the shelf. I purchased it after my Gamecube had already been unplugged, and the slight effort of hooking the thing up seemed too Herculean a task to play a game I knew I would end up thinking was alright.

Well, between deciding to do Mission: Backlog and having a Wii that I only use to play Gamecube games anymore, I was suddenly excited to play the game again. It ended up being a stranger experience than I had thought, in that the game is at the same time antiquated and yet has incorporated ideas that (at the time) were innovative. Namely, the game ends up feeling alot like an N64 shooter (namely in the Goldeneye vein). You're seldom tasked with taking out more than two or three enemies at a time, and the levels are pretty barren overall, consisting of hallways and the occasional crate with few exceptions. You'll also rely on auto targeting to a degree, as the game doesn't let you zoom or aim more accurately with any gun save one, and I only saw that one in the first hour of gameplay. However, Geist did learn something from its contemporary competition, as it controls in a similar manner to Halo by using the left joystick to move and the C-Stick to look around. So it doesn't feel quite as stiff as Goldeneye because of its updated control scheme, but almost everything else in the shooting parts of the game will give you deja vu.

Thankfully, the game offers more than just a mediocre shooter through bland hallways. You play as Raimi, who is tasked (along with an elite military unit)  with taking down an evil organization who is doing some kind of occult experiments. You are captured early on and forced into an experiment that separates your soul from your body. You spend the rest of the game attempting to get back your body and stop the evil corporation from implementing its master plan, which, of course, involves world domination. The story overall will feel incredibly familiar to anyone that has played the original Half-Life, as the story focuses around an evil corporation in an underground facility using a portal linked to another dimension. Thankfully, this is just a backdrop to the redeeming part of the game, which is the possession mechanic. At its most basic, it involves inhabiting the correct body to advance through the game. However, in order to inhabit a body in the first place, you must first scare them. It sounds pretty unexciting, but you do so by setting up certain situations, which makes scaring a person into a puzzle of sorts. For instance, at one point you must knock over a ladder that causes a man to take a backstep. Once he has backed up, you can then increase the pressure in a nearby pipe to the point of exploding, which leaves him scared enough for possession. Each level consists of two to four of this type of situation, along with possessing different animals (like a dog and mice) to advance to an area where certain important humans are. The game is over if you ever kill a person that is needed to advance, but this really only ever happened to me during boss battles.

The possession mechanic overall feels well implemented in these puzzle sections, but half-baked when combined with the shooting sections. There are nice touches every once and a while, such as possessing different turrets to take down enemies or the ability to possess explosive crates near enemies, but overall there are just too many sections where you are charging down hallways blasting enemies with no real change of pace. If the developers could have thought of a better way of handling these sections, or just taken them out completely and replaced them with something that better utilized possessing, the game would have benefited greatly and probably could have been something more memorable.

However, as it stands Geist is pretty much what I expected it was going to be: mediocre with an interesting twist. While I wasn't expecting it to feel so familiar to an N64 game, it was only in detrimental ways, as the game's shooting sections felt barren and oversimplified. Additionally, the story felt too similar to Half-Life, although it did set up a decent excuse for the body possession mechanic, which is really the only thing this game will ever be remembered for, if anyone remembers it at all. Overall, I really can't recommend Geist, namely because it feels so mediocre that even its most unique feature, which really hasn't been used that much since, can't save it.

Overall: 6.7
Recommended Price: 2.99