3/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Ghostwire: Tokyo.

[SPOILER FREE] Ghostwire: Tokyo is a weird game. It's beautiful yet distracting, smooth but clunky and also incredibly messy. Ghostwire's roughly 8 hour campaign managed to both bore me yet keep me engaged enough to sink my entire day into it. While the streets of demon ridden Tokyo are stunning to look at, it's repetitive gameplay and lack of a focused narrative held Ghostwire back from being something memorable. The streets of Tokyo are truly a graphical achievement. Walking through any area of this game puts on display the hard work from the talented environmental artists who most likely spent ages working on every finite detail in this city. The way the neon reflects off of buildings onto the puddles beneath really make this environment feel lived in. The enemy designs are also really creative, it's not just off the walls for the sake of being so, the designs tend to always tie around something human related. Whether that be a business man with an umbrella or a student in uniform, it feels like there was a lot of thought into the transformations of these beings. The combat in this game is sluggish and repetitive. While the stylish animations and flashy particles might keep you entertained for the first chunk of the game, it quickly rose to the point of nauseam where I realized that was all the game had to offer. Throughout the campaign, the main way to take out enemies was to just shoot them a lot, which made every enemy encounter feel like I was against a bunch of bullet sponges. There wasn't more creative ways to eliminate enemies other than to spam the same few moves until they died. Not only is Ghostwire's combat slow, but it lacks all tension when each combat zone turns into a cakewalk to complete. As someone that considers themselves to be not so great at video games, when I only have one death over the span of 8 hours, that is not a good sign, this is mainly due to how the combat in Ghostwire is balanced. The game oversaturates combat zones with consumables and ammo, which makes every encounter almost impossible to lose. To my knowledge, there is no inventory limit on how many consumables you can hold and I never found myself running out throughout any point during my playthrough. Whenever you're slightly low on health you can just spam the consumable button and come out completely fine. All of this makes the combat in Ghostwire incredibly boring and quickly repetitive. Ghostwire Tokyo is a game I was quite looking forward to, even though I complained a lot about it, there's still a ton to appreciate about this game. If future DLC or a sequel is released I hope the developers are able to fix the combat system, because somewhere deep in here is a really great game. Unfortunately it's covered by a forgettable first person action game that I won't remember in a few weeks.