Paranoid Android?
By PaulEMoz

Geist. It’s German for “ghost”. So why not just call it “Ghost”, then? I doubt that anyone would seriously think that this is a licensed game featuring likenesses of Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. And you just know that there are thousands of people out there that won’t even give this game the time of day, simply because they don’t understand the title.

“This Wavebird’s not very responsive.”

That would be a shame. Because although Geist may start out like your average first-person shooter (in fact, it starts out a lot like the recently released Area 51), it soon evolves into something a bit different and more interesting. It becomes, at times, something akin to a first-person puzzle game. Betcha haven’t played one of those in a while, if at all.

For a while, it seems not unlike Paradroid in some ways. You’re constantly in search of a new host, and when you’re not in a host body of some kind, you get weaker. The fun thing is, your host does not necessarily need to be a living thing. In fact, if you want to possess a living thing, you have to scare it to the extent that it is vulnerable to possession. This might mean you first have to possess a nearby waste bin and give it a good rattle, or maybe make a telephone ring off the hook. Just enough to put the willies up your target to the point that they can be yours.

“What a lovely ghost. You’re so much better than last week’s!”

However, you soon find out that the things you can possess are limited, usually to things that explode or items that you must possess at the correct time in order to make progress. That’s a pity, because given unlimited scope, this could have made for some really interesting, unparallelled entertainment. As it is, you often end up possessing some grunt soldier and blowing everyone out of your path. Think of the possibilities if this had been implemented on a larger scale.

I mean, there’s one point, fairly early in the game, where you take control of a soldier and work your way through the corridors to one specific room. At this point, a “boss” guy comes out, tells all the other soldiers to leave, and proceeds to shoot the crap out of you. At this point, you die, because there is nobody or nothing else in the room for you to possess. So what could have been an interesting battle of wits between ghost and tracker turns out to be a fairly mundane, run-of-the-mill boss battle. What a shame.

Hey, this bloke’s got shit on his shoe. Great!

And if you’re not a fan of games that don’t autosave at certain important checkpoints, Geist will lodge itself right up your hooter. The first time I played this, I played for two hours, making some notable headway into the game. However, the next time I loaded it up, I found myself right back at the tutorial (after sitting through an unskippable cutscene – grrrrr!). Oh, and when you do save the game, it only saves up to the last completed stage, not the point in the game where you actually find yourself. So if you don’t manually save your game every time the words “Stage Complete” appear on the screen, you’ll be in for some considerable angst.

What, wanker? Fair enough mate, it’s your call.

Geist really had the potential to be the thinking man’s shoot-em-up. But all it really turns out to be is a fairly short, run-of-the-mill shooter with an interesting but underused gimmick. It does get better the further you get into the game, and some of the later puzzles are great fun and really quite clever, but it’s too little, too late. I’d love to give Geist a higher rating, because it does give a new spin on an old theme. Credit for the new ideas, but when it comes down to it, there’s not quite enough game and just a few too many flaws.

September 2005

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