The creators of The Evil Within return with a first person open world game where Tokyo is overrun by monsters from Japanese mythology.
You know something’s wrong when the video game you’re playing has a line of dialogue that admits, ‘This is tedious’. In Ghostwire: Tokyo it comes during an important, story-related side quest where you’re following around the psychic impression of a woman, as she very slowly walks across town and does a bit of shopping. The line is uttered by the voice inside the main character’s head but your own internal narrator will no doubt be saying the same thing during the entirety of this peculiarly poor first person adventure.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is the third game from Japanese developer Tango Gameworks, which was founded by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. We’re great fans of Mikami’s early earlier works, including not just Resident Evil 1 and 4 but also Dino Crisis, God Hand, and Vanquish – and that’s just the games he was director on, as he acted as producer or advisor on most of Capcom’s best titles during the mid-90s and 2000s. He’s merely executive producer on Ghostwire though and sadly this is an even more disappointing game than the two The Evil Within titles.
The Evil Within was a clear attempt to leverage Mikami’s fame and experience with a Resident Evil 4 style experience that, while it has its fans, we found muddled and derivative – with the sequel being even more disappointing. Despite what you might imagine though Ghostwire is not a horror game. It’s all about ghosts and yōkai and other elements of Japanese mythology but, as the 12 age rating implies, it doesn’t even try to be tense, let alone scary.
The set-up is not well explained but it involves an unnamed man in a hannya mask disincorporating the entire population of Tokyo, evaporating their bodies and leaving their spirits to be collected by his minions… and to give you side quests. There’s a specific reason why he does this, but it’s blandly predictable and has nothing like the emotional edge the game is obviously going for.
You play as a young man named Akito, who is killed in the opening scene but becomes possessed by a ghost hunter named KK and granted his ill-defined powers. He then learns that his sister is somehow key to the villain’s plans and *sigh* sets out to rescue her.
KK is the voice that complains about boring side missions but why Akito’s mind is still in his body is not explained. In fact, almost nothing is explained, especially the scientific angle (obviously inspired by Shin Tensei Megami) that sees maths equations appearing during exorcisms and spirits being transmitted by phone wire, in order to be reconstituted as living people at the other end.
Ghostwire is silly without being fun, and that’s always a bad combination. Although the most fundamental problem with the game is that its action is not only dull but it’s extremely repetitive, has almost no nuance, and barely evolves at all throughout the whole game. You have three different magical attacks, each of which has their own ammo, with the initial Wind power working something like a revolver.
The water attack is more like a shotgun, and used to attack across a wide arc, while the fire attack is essentially a rocket. You can unlock, via the least exciting skill tree we’ve seen in a long time, what are essentially alt modes for each but that’s it – the weapons you’ll be using for 95% of the time (including a bow and arrow you almost never need) are given to you in the opening hours and nothing else is ever introduced beyond a slow-to-power-up smart bomb style attack.
Although it’s rarely necessary, you can block and sneak up to stealth kill enemies but the vast majority of encounters are just standing around in the street shooting at monsters with almost no artificial intelligence and none of which require any unique strategies beyond slowly backing away from them. There’s no cover system or dodge, but because the movement controls have a weird, intentional lag to them, the combat relies heavily on an auto-aim option on the left shoulder, without which it is almost impossible to hit enemies with any precision.
Why anyone involved thought this would be a solid enough foundation for an entire game we have no idea but it’s almost the only gameplay mechanic in the game. You can grapple to the top of buildings and glide for a short distance, but the only challenging thing about the platforming is that mantling is frustratingly inconsistent. There are no puzzles and the open world exploration is based on a small number of repeating scenarios that are copy and pasted across the city in bog standard Ubisoft style.
The side missions are definitely the most interesting parts, as they usually revolve around traditional yōkai, rather than the mostly invented ones you fight against. These monsters are not necessarily antagonistic and some have to be protected from a wave of attackers or simply placated with some food. There are tanuki to find disguised as everyday objects, weasel-like kamaitachi to chase, and various one-off hauntings and possessions.
Apart from providing an interesting primer on Japanese mythology none of this involves any complex gameplay and many have you simply wandering about a house looking for interactive objects. One, which seems dull almost to the point of parody, involves poking around a closed down office looking for emails describing why people kept quitting their job there – because their boss, who is now a spirit, can’t move on without knowing.
Given how many icons are plastered across the game’s map the sheer lack of interesting things to do in the game is almost impressive, as if someone made the game world but intended to put the gameplay in later – but forgot until the last minute.
To add insult to injury, the way Tokyo is portrayed is extremely unflattering, since there are no people around to talk to and everything is set at night and often in the rain. Tokyo is one of the most exciting cities in the world to visit and games like Yakuza show this very well. Ghostwire’s version of the city is, literally, devoid of life and while it certainly looks authentic it’s just an empty husk, reduced to miles of boring grey concrete and seemingly endless construction yards.
The one positive about the game is that there are some visual flourishes that hint at the talent that obviously resides at Tango Gameworks, but which have so far been sadly misdirected. Occasionally the game will use the reality bending abilities of its antagonist to flip the world literally upside down, while wall murals can come alive, and you’ll randomly see road markings fluttering in the wind as if they’re paper decorations.
All of this is very rare though, and absolutely not worth enduring everything else to see, in what is a depressingly dull experience whose final failure is some truly pathetic boss battles, that make you wonder whether the developers were working on the game under some kind of duress.
We can’t say this is the worst game of the year – that title is unlikely to be stolen away from Babylon’s Fall – but it is certainly the most disappointing. It triggers the same reward centres in the brain as the average Ubisoft open world game but it’s so lacking in serious challenge it barely feels interactive. Why anyone involved ever thought Ghostwire: Tokyo was a good idea is a far more pressing mystery than anything that actually happens in the game.
Ghostwire: Tokyo review summary
In Short: Rarely has such a big budget game been based on such a thin gameplay premise, with this bafflingly dull first person action adventure that begins to run out of steam by the end of the tutorial level.
Pros: At times the game can be very visually inventive, even if those moments are few and far between. Learning about yōkai is interesting and everything works with a degree of competence.
Cons: Dull combat never evolves beyond the initial hours. No other major gameplay mechanics of any note and little in the way of engaging storytelling. Uninteresting open world and terrible boss battles.
Score: 4/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed) and PC
Price: £59.99
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: Tango Gameworks
Release Date: 25th March 2022
Age Rating: 12
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