If you’ve been following Shirow’s manga Ghost in the Shell and are now hooked on Kenji Kamiyama’s anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, then you’ll most likely want to give this game a shot. You will get the opportunity to play one of the Section 9 elite agents from the series, Motoko, Batou, Saito or Togusa. Part human, part cyborg, each character has their strengths, but none were ones I found all that useful considering I relied very heavily on the child-like spider robot called the Tachikoma. The Tachikoma is a battle tank that follows you on your missions. They are fairly solid and can take up quite a bit of room in a narrow hall. If you’re bad at FPS games, they will probably aim and kill a lot better than you can. If you ever feel like you don’t know where you’re doing, you can basically rely on your Tachikoma to help you out and do all the work.I do generally enjoy a good first person shooter as long as the controls are smooth, easy to handle and the game gives me a lot of room to mistakes. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex meets one of those requirements. There is definitely a lot of room for error, especially when the Tachikoma does most of the work for me. However the controls are slow, and the crosshair doesn’t automatically center so I am all over the place while people are shooting me from the side. There are 4 types of key assignments you can choose from, but you need to choose at the start of you game in the options menu. For some reason I naturally play inversed, even though I don’t recall playing that many flight simulators, but that puts me at a disadvantage when a game doesn’t offer the inverse keys. Instead I am constantly staring at the floor instead of looking up. Thank goodness for the Tachikoma! They are smart enough to usually go in front and take the brunt of the attack. The auto-target also isn’t as helpful as it could be and since the controls feel a sluggish it’s hard to really aim. But of course, with Tachikoma, who needs to!
The briefing screen before each mission allows you to figure out what you’re supposed to do in case you missed the objective during the long drawn out dialogue. The overview gives you a nice summary, but if you want to cut the summary short, you can’t. You have to listen to the whole thing. What I don’t understand is why didn’t they include the pause and click X to continue feature. There are many commands you need to know in regards to your Tachikoma. The in game tutorial zips through the buttons much too fast and similar to the overview, it doesn’t give you the option to pause at all. Right before a mission, you can configure your Tachikoma, choose the character you want to play and the weapons you want to load. If the default blue Tachikoma is not to your liking, you have the options of green, ash, red, white amber, violet and aqua! Besides coming in your favorite color, they also have the ability to carry a large amount of weaponry, which will come in handy. There are also four styles of Tachikomas, balanced, aggressive, intelligent and humorous. Each mission is relatively short, with six chapters and three to four missions per chapter. The missions do become progressively difficult, so if you can’t get a handle on the controls it can get quite frustrating.
The voice acting is great, considering they used the same voice actors from the anime. This makes listening to the dialogue much more enjoyable than the reading text floating across the screen. However the dialogue contains a lot of your typical futuristic techno jargon that it takes a few tries for someone like to me to figure out what’s going on. I also think the characters were better off not moving their mouths because it didn’t really flow with the dialogue so it ended up looking like a poorly dubbed foreign movie. The character models themselves looked good, especially during the cut scenes but the locations seemed a bit too bland. You almost feel like you get a sense of dйjа vu since your surroundings look so similar and you’re fighting the same enemies. The soundtrack to this game is decent, with some techno tracks that are upbeat and fun. The mood it creates really suits the sci-fi atmosphere.
There is the option to play with up to six other players in multiplayer mode, either in a team-based format or a free for all. Unfortunately I don’t have that many people around me with a PSP so I didn’t get a chance to see how I measure up against the others. Even if I did, the game requires that each player has a copy of the game before you can play together.
With a good cast and your light-hearted sidekick the Tachikoma, it livens up the story a bit but otherwise, it’s quite slow. The premise of the game is simple, terrorists are being bad, fight terrorists, find out why terrorists are being bad. I haven’t had a chance to see the anime yet, although I hear great things about the manga/movie/series. If you are a fan of Ghost in the Shell, this may be worth checking out. If you are looking for a good FPS, I think you may need to look elsewhere.
I am a Canadian living in California with my husband and my precious baby Bailey (95lbs of labrador fun). I work full time and go to school, so finding the time to play video games is tough. I still manage to sneak some time in, whether it's playing on my GBA while I wait in line or sitting in the back seat of my car so I can use our dvd player to play the Gamecube on long trips. I've always been fairly decent at playing games to give my younger brother some competition. I started at the early age of 6 when I inherited an Atari 2600. I played any computer game I could get my hands on during those Commodore 64 days. Now I'll play anything from RPGs to first person shooters, racing games or basically anything that's fun and allows me to play with at least 3 other people.
