Recently, I’ve finished "Ghostwire: Tokyo". I have a love-hate relationship with it, to be honest. It’s not a bad game per say, if it was, I would not have played it for 26 hours, but it had too many things, that were annoying to me.
The story was lackluster at best, it’s on par with lower mid-tear anime. The characters are quite shallow, although at times the story tries to make them seem deeper. The side quests are sometimes fine for what they are, but some of them have more potential to tell you more about the lore, which they do not use.
Visually it is… Strange. For me it was very blurry even on max settings and somehow everything was a reflecting surface. Even with RTX disabled. Like, I literally noticed tree trunks reflect stuff sometimes. Yes, tree trunks. It happened just a couple of times, but still, it did happen.
Combat and "stealth" are lackluster, too. It behaves more like an FPS, where every skill or item works as a "gun", but they do not feel as unique among each other and, generally, do not provide that much of satisfaction, when you use them, even when you are able to kill an enemy. Especially, since it is mainly constant mouse-clicking (or button-mashing) rather than something strategic (although you can try that by switching between various types of magic, of course).
Overall, it has certain design elements (which I cover more extensively here), that just made me feel as creators do not like people and want them to suffer during gameplay. And not like in "Dark Souls" or any other souls-like game. In those you suffer, because of high difficulty, and I can understand the appeal of that, even though I am not a fan of the genre. Here it is suffering through poor choices.
The only thing, that I found consistent through out the game is level-design. I certainly can appreciate the amount of work put into replicating parts of Tokyo, even though it is probably scaled down quite a bit. On the other hand, is that achievement for level designers or for the architects? There were also some "glitches", that did look quite nice. Not to the level of "DmC", but still relatively good.
In the end, I would not recommend this game, unless you like the aesthetics of the game, where everything is too shiny, almost cyberpunk-like (the style, not the game), and have some time to explore this Tokyo replica. And even if you do – better get it on discount.
