The Haunted Hoard: Ghosthunter (PS2)

Ghosthunter’s trip to American shores is a bit of a bumpy one. Originally developed by Sony Computer Entertainment’s Cambridge studio, the game was first released in Europe. However, due to lukewarm reception and sales, Sony made the decision not to publish the game outside of that territory, but Namco must have seen something they liked as soon they agreed to publish the game in the United States. Not only would they be releasing it though, they allowed for the team to make tweaks to the game design based on people’s criticisms of the game, supposedly over 1,500 tweaks made to try and help it realize its potential overseas. While I have not played the European version so I can’t compare the two versions or the later released Japanese version that was instead published through a joint venture between EA and Square, it is fascinating how a flawed game that was seemingly dead on arrival was given a second chance at life when so many like it are left for dead.

 

In Ghosthunter you play as a rookie cop named Lazarus Jones as he and his partner Anna Steele are called to investigate an old abandoned school where ten students had been killed under mysterious circumstances many years back. While they’re there just to respond to the latest superstitious call, Lazarus ends up stumbling into an unusual area beneath the school and activating a machine that unleashes the captured spirits inside all across the world. Doing so awakens an AI construct styled after the machine’s owner, a professor who is also the primary suspect in the students’ death. While Lazarus doesn’t seem too regretful about accidentally unleashing so many malevolent spirits at first, he begins working with the AI to recapture them so he can learn more about the professor only to find out Steele has been captured by the most dangerous spirit, a decaying knight with a dark history known as Sir Hawksmoor.

Lazarus himself is a talkative character quick to make a humorous comment at the situation he finds himself in, and while he doesn’t get to spend too much time with Steele, the two have a fun back and forth that evokes the kind of high energy cop shows where the crimes aren’t too serious and everyone’s able to dish out quips while busting perps. However, Lazarus isn’t dealing with criminals on his adventure, his ghost busting journey mostly leading him interacting with the AI who actually manages a bit of sarcasm and sass despite being presented as a character bound by logical programming. Along the adventure you’ll also encounter some other friendly characters with exaggerated personalities like the lingering spirit of the old World War II Colonel Freddie Fortesque who finds an interesting way to phrase even the simplest of things while also falling apart due to his family lineage having the bad luck of constantly being cannon fodder. There are some more serious elements, Hawksmoor is an eloquent antagonist who commands the scenes he appears in quite well even when Lazarus is dishing out his usual material. As you travel around catching the accidentally released ghosts you will also find papers or interact with supernatural echoes that show you the unfortunate history of people who met violent ends or unjustly suffered due to the actions of the current ghost you’re trying to track down.

 

Ghosthunter is a third-person shooter that does do a good job of varying up the locations you’ll be visiting. Each area has a main ghost or two to focus on, be that the friendly librarian of the school who only wants to leave her books in order or the unrepentant killer of the swamp whose afterlife is tied with the mutated alligator who killed him. Even the regular ghosts you face in fairly frequent combat tend to have specific ghost types appear primarily in one location. The swamp is full of chainsaw swinging spirits and marksman ghosts who snipe from afar, the prison’s guards live on after death and try to get in close to clobber you, and aboard the ship you first fight against actual soldier spirits before shifting to trying to work around the deadly tentacles of someone who shifted into a sea monster after their untimely end. You’ll still occasionally encounter a few of the simpler foes like the big hulking revenants and the flying spooks throughout the adventure, but the enemy mix also guarantees the new foes don’t grow old before you leave the area since they aren’t hosting all the action themselves. A few ghosts even ask for more than simply fighting with your ghost-hunting weapons too, and while some like the poltergeists require an interesting bit of puzzle solving to reveal, others like the squealing Howler ghosts often require slowly pursuing them without being seen and their touchiness in certain situations can be a bit annoying. The tentacles aboard the ship that later threaten to reintroduce stealth can be a worry too, but they don’t seem to function too well and you can sometimes walk right past them despite the supposed danger in them detecting you.

The variety in ghost types does make the combat rather enjoyable though, especially since you have a decent set of weapons to bring to bear against the unleashed spirits. Your default pistol and its infinite ammo is mostly just a backup or useful for moments where you want to break something without losing any valuable resources, but most ghosts require something much stronger or specific to deal damage to them. The pulse rifle utilizes special ghost energy and wears down ghosts fairly quickly, but for some tougher foes the raw power of a close range shotgun blast can be a better choice. The grenade launcher is perhaps not as powerful as one might expect and even when you use its smoke to reveal invisible spirits its not totally reliable in that regard, but the ghost energy powered sniper rifle is actually fairly powerful in the situations that actually allow you to slow down and line up your shots. Nearer to the end of the game you get a special Spectral Lasso weapon that fires a continuous beam of ghost energy to speed up ghost hunting as the game starts packing them in more and is mostly done introducing new varieties of ghost, but its heavy use of ghost energy means it has to be used properly or you’ll be left with fewer options for a while. The ghost energy that serves as ammunition as well as health refills thankfully pop off ghosts while you’re working to capture them, and while some spirits must simply be put down, most require you to hit them with the special ghost capturing grenade. It can be tossed with ease through the air, but if a ghost isn’t weakened when hit they’ll often run about and make it harder to reduce their health to the point they’re caught. It slides in smoothly into the battle system though and gives the battles a bit of a different flow where you need to try and slip in the captures while handling the aggression of other ghosts, and with some creative ghost and boss designs like giant junkyard golems puppeted by poltergeists or little girls who mutate their teddy bears into monsters who now carry them like dolls, the battle system ends up a fairly good component of the adventure.

 

Sadly, Ghosthunter doesn’t just lean on its combat and ghost design creativity for play. There are moments where Lazarus is exploring a place and you need to figure out how to make progress that are understandable breaks from the gun fights, but far too often you’ll find a ring of spirit energy where he calls upon his ghostly ally Astral to take over for a bit. Astral can fly freely through the air but she does so at an incredibly slow speed while at the same time the sections that feature her often have a lot of open space. Usually when you call on her she has one thing she needs to do but the area around her is so vast that finding that single function takes too much time for how little you’re actually doing. What makes this a more excruciating process is that Astral can’t really do anything unless she takes on certain spectral forms based on certain enemies you encounter. While you might think the giant zombie-like Revenant might give her a thrilling power, it actually just allows her to become solid and walk around and pull switches, Astral many times just needing to fly off an hit a switch Lazarus can’t reach. A deeper problem comes from the ghost energy cost Astral’s abilities incur, your ghost energy reserves draining fast while she’s utilizing them and the opportunities to refill them during these sections often involve slowly flying off to grab floating orbs. There really doesn’t seem to be any reason for the limits since the benefits of these abilities are so limited, but by the time you do start to get more interesting ones like possessing other spirits you’ve drudged through so many large areas with Astral’s boring powers that you’ll just want to get Astral segments over with and move back to the enjoyable shooting.

THE VERDICT: Ghosthunter can balance having a mostly humorous cast well with moments where haunting or dark concepts come into play, but the balance between battling ghosts and solving puzzles comes up short. The small range of weapons and the grenade capture system do work well for tackling the varied set of spirits and when Lazarus is mixing navigational puzzles with fights the game can be enjoyable, but any time Astral must be called upon things slow to a crawl as her underwhelming abilities, slow speed, and trips through annoyingly large areas with little to do in them become the focus. There are some moments that don’t work as well during Lazarus’s exploration as well like slowly pursuing Howlers, but Astral’s presence bogs down some otherwise good ghost busting action.

 

And so, I give Ghosthuner for PlayStation 2…

An OKAY rating. Astral isn’t the only problem with Ghosthunter, the finale promises an impressive new way to fight only for it to be underwhelming and some boss fights come up a little short, but the overall quality of the combat and the game’s ability to weave in little narratives either about silly characters like Fortesque or serious situations like the unfortunate deaths of a few children makes for an experience that keeps throwing out new ideas it mostly handles well. The gun system is condensed down so you are making informed choices about what to use against a certain ghost type and the ammo limitations push you to try and capture spirits quickly without risking too much of your health. The enemy ghosts are even a fairly good bunch, not every idea a winner but their reactions to weapons or how they try to attack you making forward progress in a wide range of unique environments even more interesting. Astral is just such an incredibly poor way of introducing a break from the action that she brings the game to a screeching halt repeatedly. Sometimes I would hesitate to call it puzzle solving since she just needs to fly to a switch with the “challenge” more about just finding that simple goal in a large area you can’t cover quickly, and while some abilities like turning solid are underwhelming, others like traveling through slime portals are rarely used and others are finicky like the power she gets to blast away barriers that require her to be positioned quickly while burning up her ghost energy. Removing the ghost energy toll on her feels like it should have been done in the game’s adaptation for the U.S. market and speeding her up would also be a good way to make these sections more tolerable. Overall it practically adds nothing though and her story importance could still work without her even being playable, but unfortunately this shooter is saddled with her and thus lesser for it.

 

Ghosthunter isn’t totally a tragic situation of one game being ruined by one mechanic, it still needing a little more polish in areas like the finale and other fights to truly shine, but those moments would be easier to look past if they didn’t keep the poor company of Astral’s bad puzzle solving segments. Ghosthunter can be a light-hearted adventure at one moment and then crank up the dial on spooky atmosphere at another, creative with some ideas but not forgetting to provide a lot of the expected accoutrements of ghost stories and ghost-busting sci-fi at the same time. There’s still enough good in it that you can enjoy those elements despite the interruption of Astral’s gameplay, but it feels like this game needs one more pass of multiple improvements before it can be the game that Sony, Namco, EA, and Square all hoped it could be.