Game Review - Ghostwire Tokyo

Game Review: Ghostwire Tokyo by Tango Gameworks, published by Bethesda Softworks
Score: +8/-4

Tokyo's population has vanished and deadly supernatural forces prowl the streets. Hone your otherwordly abilities to unravel the truth behind the disappearance and save the city. Explore brand-new single player content with the Spider's Thread update!

We got Ghostwire Tokyo for free during the Christmas season of 2023 through the Epic Games Store. If you don't know, EGS gives away a free game every week, and during the holiday season in the latter half of December, they give away one game every day. Often the games are ones you've probably never heard of, but the holiday season often has some notables such as Destiny 2 Legacy Collection, The Outer Worlds (Spacer's Choice Edition), and Saints Row.

Overall despite some of its weaknesses, Ghostwire plays well and has a fantastic, satisfying story. Like Prey, it is definitely one of the ones that didn't get the popularity it deserved.

+1 First person shooter / stealth game with a refreshing IP using Japanese folklore.

• -1 I feel something is off with combat balancing if you have to spawn in ammo and consumables during a scripted fight or boss fight. Probably ammunition reserves are too scarce.
• -0 Definitely some balancing issues with some boss types. It's very hard to fight them head-on without cheesing. There are some stealth exploits, cheese weapons like Stun Talismans (combined with then running behind them and doing a stealth takedown for massive damage), or just running away till they finish their attack sequence then shooting back. Too much cheese makes fights feel unsatisfying.
• Thankfully not really any tricky platforming involved for quests.
• A distinct lack of tentacles.

+1 Good to very good horror segments, though not a "horror" game per se.

• Not overdone with jump scares and spooky areas all the time, generally only during certain side quests and main quests.
• Quality over quantity here and a variety of things to see during those longer, well-crafted sidequests.

+1 Fairly faithful recreation of the real Shibuya as the open world location, as you can see from this comparison video between Ghostwire Tokyo and Shibuya.

• +1 Graphics and world building are great.
• -0 Strangely, as we played more and unlocked more world areas, FPS started to drop dramatically.

+1 Intriguing story that hooks you right from the start. Key main story scenes are impactful and exciting. +1 Fantastic, touching, satisfying ending.

-1 But otherwise the game is very slow and boring if you start exploring the open world and doing side activities to level up.

• Far too many soul-rescue sites.
• All that looking around and platforming costs a lot of time. This continues until mid to late game when you get the skill to summon your own grapple points, but even then that skill is somewhat inconsistent.
• Reducing the number of sites as well as marking on your map anything spotted within can really help here especially as you are spending a lot of time looking around for what you left behind when you went after souls in a particular direction.
• Turning in the rescued souls also takes unnecessarily long with a long animation plus a dialog for confirmation when there is no real reason to not turn them in.
• Early combat is very punishing with even weak enemies doing gobs of damage and quite good at avoiding single-shot attacks. This encourages stealth skills, which slows things down even more.
• -1 Monster hunts and most open world activities were straightforward, with few exceptions too easy, and boring.

-0 On the map. hovering over a shrine shows some area completion stats which can be useful, except the zone summary also obscures a large chunk of the zone.

+1 Levelling feels good as you can feel the difference when you get stronger because enemies are not levelled.

• +1 Instead, as you uncover more of the open world, new stronger enemies and bosses are presented, which also helps keep combat feeling fresh. At major milestones, interesting new enemies are added to the open world, not just in one-time quests.
• -1 Some skills feel worthless, too hard to use, or too hard/inconsistent in triggering, such as ground smash, summoning grapple points, and chaining death-from-above takedowns.