Ghost Squad (Wii)
Filed Under Reviews
While Sega-AM2 is best known for the Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, and Shenmue series of games, all mega-hits in their own right, they also created a little game back in 1994 known as Virtua Cop. It was a 3D on-rails light-gun based shooter, one of the first of its kind, and was a stellar performer in both the Western and Eastern arcades. Ghost Squad hails from that legacy, building on the features established by the three Virtua Cops, but delivering only a somewhat fun, short, repetitive, and aesthetically unappealing, experience.
You begin the game as part of the G.H.O.S.T, or Global Humanitarian Operation and Special Tactics, Squad, a group of specialized soldiers based in the United States and operating under the authority of the U.N. Their objective is to take out terrorist targets without leaving any traces of their passing. After receiving instructions from your Commander, you play as Alpha Team and find support in the way of teams Bravo, Charlie, and Delta. During the game, you fight the Indigo Wolves, a terrorist group seeking to throw the world into complete turmoil by capturing presidents and holding military personnel hostage. It’s your job to take them down at all costs.
There are three stages in the game: Grand Villa, Air Force One, and Jungle. Each stage has a varied look to the terrain, which is welcome in an age when many on-rail shooters showcase the same stage types over and over again. Each stage also has varying paths that you unlock during subsequent play throughs and successful completion of events. These paths allow the player to take different routes through the stages, changing the events encountered and the way the action unfolds in the story. Regardless of what different routes are taken, the finale remains the same.
Fortunately, to make this work, the player gets an infinite amount of continues. Unfortunately, the game can be unforgiving at times, and no matter how well you might do on the rest of the stage, if you fail one event you will have to do the stage over if you want to unlock the extra routes. If that wasn’t enough, in order to replay the stage, you have to start the game over, as being unable to defeat the boss leads to a failed mission and once a mission is failed or completed successfully you can’t replay until the game ends.
Controlling the game is a bit hit or miss. The Wii Zapper can be used with the game, though I found it more comfortable just holding the Wii Remote in hand and using it like a pointer. Like the arcade game, the Wii game has a calibration option under its Options Menu, which helps a lot. This is also handy because the only way you amass a huge number of points is to play the game without the shooting reticule on screen. ‘B’ shoots, ‘A’ performs actions during events, and moving the Wii Remote moves your cursor on screen. The Remote, which can never hope to replace a light-gun, is responsive enough, but there is a slightly noticeable amount of lag. AM2 seems to have factored this into the equation because the enemies are slow enough that the little bit of lag you experience shouldn’t matter in the slightest. The game misses the boat on reloading, however, since you have to shake the Remote to reload. Sometimes it will respond and sometimes it won’t. Since there are infinite continues, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem, until it comes time to face off against the bosses, where missed reloads can cost the player dearly.
The reason for the repetitive play through lies in the way the game levels up your character. As you replay stages and unlock routes, you also amass experience by killing enemies, the accuracy in your shots, how many medals you pick up, and how little you die. After finishing all three stages, your experience is calculated and your character levels up, which affords them new weapons, new costumes, such as a Rambo-esque outfit, Virtua Cop throwbacks, and a Panda suit, as well as new ranks, such as Sergeant and Marshal. There are 25 weapons in the game, each with different abilities and totally different feels. Your starting weapon has some accuracy and shoots 3 times before stopping, but it’s not all that powerful. However, the shotgun you get next has a lot of power and awards you a number of points because of the ease with which you can double kill enemies but has the tendency to hit innocent bystanders. Picking the right weapon can make all the difference.
The game is fun when playing with more than one person and is the only way to play. In Arcade mode, two players can work their way through the game but in Party Mode up to four players can engage in the hilarity of Ninja Mode and Paradise mode, the former giving your characters Ninja outfits with infinite shuriken as weapons while the enemies don kabuki and ninja outfits and the latter changing all of the men into bikini clad females and your guns into dolphin water pistols that have to be reloaded like normal guns. Both modes are fun but Paradise mode is really what Party mode is all about. AM2’s sense of humor is slathered all over Paradise Mode and any fan of AM2 games will be right at home with the mode.
Graphically, the arcade game, released in 2004, was beautiful for the time. The Wii game, however, is appalling. If you haven’t had the chance to play a Dreamcast game, now is your chance. Low resolution textures, chunky looking character models, and plenty of placid special effects will seem like a throw back to a time when the Playstation 2 was in its infancy and the Dreamcast was starting to lose steam. It’s a shame, really, because the Sega Chihiro arcade board was capable of some beautiful graphics and the Wii is capable of something similiar. The sound also leaves a lot to be desired. Repetitive sound effects, awful voice acting that borders on hilarious and sad, and out of place sound run rampant across this game. If it wasn’t for the rave induced music, I’d recommend turning off the sound completely.
Sega decided to offer the ability to upload your score to Nintendo WiFi leaderboards, but unless you’re prepared to put in quite a bit of time, you’ll find yourself in 60,000th place or lower. Some of the top ranks have several million points per game. It’s at least comforting to know that Sega did think of including the option to upload your top scores, as pointless as it seems.
Ghost Squad isn’t a terrible game but it’s not a strong Wii title either, which probably led to the reason it was released as a $29.99 budget game. The varying routes through stages, assortment of weapons, events and activities such as defusing bombs and rescuing hostages will be fun the first time through, but the repetitive nature of the game coupled with the god-awful graphics and grating sound will turn off some to an otherwise middle of the road title. Ghost Squad is best enjoyed in groups of 2 or more, and if that can’t be had, then you should probably think of it as a ghost and act like it never existed.
