Geist

If you are willing to forgive some of the niggles with the engine, then underneath lurks a program full of idea, invention, wit and life (although the motorcycle section seems somewhat out of place).

As much as n-Space tries to do things a little differently, and as fun as it is to walk around in bodies that don't belong to you, too much of the game plays it by the same old rules.

If you're desperate for an FPS on your Cube, Geist is one of the few choices out there, but if you can help it, save your money.

Geist is intriguing enough as the sum of its parts to elicit forgiveness for its shooting gameplay.

Geist is the kind of game the Gamecube needs. The idea of a wandering spirit works fantastically and is fun to play, but as a shooter Geist has nothing to offer. [Oct 2005]

An undeveloped but great take on first-person views makes this a strong rental but iffy purchase.

The game also suffers from some real clipping issues when the action begins to ramp up, as well as graphics that don't do the game justice.

Thanks to some new mechanics tossed into an old (and some would say dying) genre, Geist delivers a FPS experence that you've never had before and that definitely counts for something.

If possession is nine tenths the law, then Geist succeeds in possessing a game with a few genres mixed together all in one game. It's just too bad this game doesn't exactly raise my spirits.

Despite a few memorable sequences, the occasional good puzzle, and some barely adequqte multiplayer modes, Geist fails in most respects. [Sept 2005, p.106]

There's really no way around it; while Geist offers some neat ideas, it's an entry level shooter with an okay story and few interesting gameplay elements.

Playing as a ghost who can possess people, animals and inanimate objects is a definite novelty, but a lot of the game's action sequences have a been there, done that feel.

The game can be a murky, sloppy mess, and even when it's trying something interesting, comes off incomplete and badly implemented. [Sept 2005, p.57]

A sloppy mess of nonsensical plot points, dumb puzzles (which often boil down to trial-and-error guessing), and yet more bland blasting sections toward the end of the game, when this whole ghost train really derails. [Sept 2005, p.114]

The enemies are dim-witted but manage to stay alive longer than they should thanks to awful hit detection. [Oct 2005, p.100]

The potential of a ghostly character capable of leaping from soldier to soldier, causing chaos in the middle of a firefight has barely been scratched, not to mention the poltergeist scenarios that could be crafted around possessing exploding lightbulbs, flying bedsheets, rattling pots and pans, or any number of other things that could be employed for the purpose of haunting.

With normal graphics, background music that tends to be forgotten, and low replay-ability, Geist is better off on the store shelves than in your Gamecube, at least until it hits the bargain bins.

The overall effect is that you're playing an unholy union between an old -- and not very good -- point-and-click adventure and a five-year old first-person shooter.

The first-person combat is lively, but decidedly average. The controls are overly-sensitive and a little imprecise, particularly for movement up and down (the y-axis). Oddly there are no adjustments to dampen or even this out.

Unfortunately, you spend more time scaring the crap out of people than blowing the crap out of people, which slows down the action.

It's riddled with great ideas that are realized using merely decent execution, and saddled with a painfully linear level design.

Geist isn't a great title, but it is pretty good. If you're looking for something a little different than the standard FPS fare, Geist is definitely worth taking a look at.

The spiritual possession adventure/puzzle solving aspects of the game were very fun and refreshing. Unfortunately the game's engine just could not quite deliver on the other elements of the game that strung it all together.