This game is a trap, and I fell for it. Last year when I was doing the 100 Days of Gaming, I set aside Fridays to play demos of games that looked interesting. At the time I got my first taste of this game... and after a meaty hour or so, I wanted more. Suffice it to say, it wound up in my collection and before too long, the dice selected it as my next game to play. I was excited. But sadly, this game is pretty front loaded, and by the time you reach the second half, you've pretty much had all the "good parts."
You will play this game as a team of five kids: Chris (the leader), Matt (the brain), Biggy (the brawn), Charlie (the tomboy), and Kevin (the little brother). These friends have been hanging around with each other for years and make the perfect teamup for a 1980s TV special/Saturday morning cartoon which is the exact feel this game is going for from the moment you press start. As such, your adventure starts with Chris being woken up by Kevin excitedly calling on the walkie-talkie. You see, he has just made an amazing discovery he just has to show everyone else... a dead body. But the real surprise is the pink pyramid shaped gem in the corpse's hand. When Matt looks into it, he finds it has the unique ability to reveal to those who use it the world of the dead. However, this also explained the dead man since in order to use this power, the stone feeds off one's lifeforce. Thankfully this won't be a big problem for our gang of kids as Matt can get around it using an energy source he was experimenting with called "gamma bars." Not only that, but Kevin has the perfect test: look in the ghost world for his deceased and deeply missed dog Sparky. And so the kids head out to start what will become the adventure of a lifetime.
The path the story takes to get here is all over the place, but in a more then amusing way. One moment you are following the ghost of your dog into a graveyard, the next you are fighting with a street gang, and then you are sneaking around town to avoid the soldiers holding it in quarantine, and we are not even halfway through! And yet it still manages to move forward to show you just what threat the town is in and ultimately what the world might face. Unfortunately, once the threat has been revealed, it's like the game devs felt like they didn't quite use every idea they wanted to, and decided to just throw stuff in seemingly at random. So in the second half you start getting things like dragons and time-travel seemingly on a whim. And then comes what might well be one of the single most disappointing endings I have ever seen. It is not only cliche as hell, but directly copies another game that was much better written (at least till it's own ending): The Longest Journey.
And much like the story, the gameplay starts on an amazing first step as you collect your team and begin to play with the world of the dead. You will have a blast beating the tar out of hostile ghosts, exploring the areas you travel through, and even finding side-missions to help the other citizens of your city... but all that changes just a few short hours and about half-way through the game. By this point you have played several scinarios and a couple of bosses that use your characters and their abilities brilliantly, teaching you to use powers in tandem and forming a great experience. But then it all begins to fall apart, starting with jumping puzzles requiring you to use your more ghostly companions as the blocks you jump on appear and dissappear much like an old 8-bit 2D action game might have. The problem here, however, is that this is not a 2D platformer, but a birds-eye-view game where it becomes all to easy to loose track of where you are in 3D space and miss platforms, lose life, and have to start the sequence all over again. It is simply a problem with the graphical style of the game vs the design they were aiming for at this point. And while it takes away from the game, it doesn't get too bad... yet...
That's before you start facing off with simplistic bosses you can dodge completely after watching their 30 second combat loop while others become impossible to track as they attack you from off screen in the cheapest moves possible. You face off with puzzles that don't give you all the information you need to solve them without brute forcing your way through, or are obnoxiously slow to work through due to the nature of the abilities you need to use. You face off with mini-game after mini-game which range from button mashing to a bullet hell game where you might as well be moving on ice while you try to skirt by, leading to a game that starts as a pure joy to play becoming pure hell.
In short, this game doesn't stay fun or good in any way for too long.
Bugs: The only bug I could find in this game is in the graphical layering in some places. Things your character should be behind, they remain over. This adds to issues in the jumping puzzle where you think you are over a piece of land, for example, where in stead you splash into the liquid death behind it... but you do so on top of it. Its a really weird scene and just plain confusing.
Overall: As I noted in the opening paragraph, this game is a trap. A great demo which entices you to buy what you think will be a great game, but one that quickly sours when you reach the second half. I managed to keep trying for about 9 hours before I threw in the towel. And for this reason I can not recommend the game. Just play the demo and enjoy what could have been but ultimately was not.
Score:
4/10
System Requirements:
- Intel Core Duo E4500 (or 2 3000)
- 1 GB RAM
- Geforce 9600 GT (256 MB VRAM)
- Windows Vista
- 4 GB hard drive space
- Ryzen 3 2200G running at 3.5 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 10
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