First person shooter with a unique twist.
In Geist you play as John Raimi, who investigates the doings of a company called Volks Corporation. Raimi soon finds out that Volks has invented a machine that can separate mind form the body. This of course is intended for the use of spies and soldiers in order to conquer the world. Unfortunately Raimi himself gets caught and his mind is ripped out from his body. So now as a ghost you have to stop Volks from doing these experiments.
Graphics are bad. Usually a title that is exclusively for GameCube has at least a personal and colorful graphical style, but to my eyes Geist is very humble in terms of its appearance. For some reason your ghost form looks very good, but it’s the only character model in Geist that does so. Sound effects are mostly passable, but the musical score feels like it just doesn’t belong there. Worth of mentioning are Geist’s guns, which sound more like an air gun that shoots tennis balls rather than an assault rifle for example. On the other hand every gun has an infinite amount of ammo in it.
Puzzle portions of Geist are really the best thing that its gameplay offers. Inanimate objects like explosive crates can be possessed right away, but living beings require you to scare them first. In order to do so you must usually posses a few inanimate objects in the vicinity of a living being. These puzzles are fun to solve and your perspective changes all the time: a dog sees its surroundings a lot different than a rat, a parrot or a soldier.
Unfortunately fun stops when shooting starts. Controls are sluggish and this makes aiming more difficult than it should be. Rag doll physics are not very good, because the corpses behave like they were soft rag dolls and not some poor human’s earthly remnants. First person shooting is also extremely boring and you just makes you wait to be able to move forward quickly and do more puzzles.
Geist has a split screen multiplayer in it, but because the shooting is not fun it won’t last long. I played multiplayer for about 15 minutes and that was enough.
Geist has a distinguishable premise in it and it definitely has potential, but bland graphics and sluggish controls hinder Geist from achieving the status of a great game.