Ghost Squad review (Wii)

Light gun games can be great fun. They are gaming guilty pleasures that wallow in shallow, mindless destruction unlikely to offend anyone. Then, along comes a game like Ghost Squad, and suddenly you just feel guilty.

I’ve seen Ghost Squad running in the arcade bit of a pub, and the Wii conversion is pretty accurate, only without the whole card-swipe thing that seems a little much fuss to oldies like me, and you kids don’t know you’re born, in my day it was 10p to play pinball down the shops and we counted ourselves lucky. Etc, etc…

Mining the Depths of Mediocrity

There’s nothing supernatural here – just a bunch of clean-shaven covert-ops teenagers going up against a camp version of the Californian Chopper cast on ‘roids. In fact, the whole game is so heavily doused in the lavender tang of accidental homoeroticism that half an hour’s play would turn your average Yorkshire miner into Laurence Llewellyn Bowen.

Only not married.

And actually gay.

Not that that’s a bad thing, Mr Yorkshire miner, but you’d need to spend a lot of time gathering yourself to break it to your parents, and that could distract from game playing time, so you know, be careful and all that.

>ahem<

That’s Just Typical

Ghost Squad ticks all the boxes of the light gun genre. From terrible, 2D hero ‘characters’ with voice acting bad enough to make Capcom wince, to ink-stamp baddies queuing up in learnable patterns to be shot down. On rails movement, surreal situations, infinite ammo, guns that reload by pointing them off screen – so far so good!

However.

There are just three levels to this game.

There are some alternate routes that unlock as you play through the three levels over and over and over again, as well as costumes, weapons, and… well, that’s about it.

Trouble is, although the weapons make things interesting-ish, and the alternate routes are… alternate, the game only has three levels! No matter how you cut it, that’s just not enough. Play through once – about an hour or less – and you’ve witnessed all the ‘plot’ elements, heard the best bits of laughable dialogue, and visited all the environments. After that familiarity breeds contempt. Even the best ‘joke’ the game has to offer – comedy costumes you see in the cutscenes – gets tired real fast.

Multiplayer (Lack of) Mayhem

The multiplayer allows up to four player to blast away together in relative confusion over who hit what, not helped by the fudgy aim the game seems to have by comparison with other Zapper games, but the missions remain essentially the same three each time.

The game nicely and naturally works with the Zapper, which is something. You can upload scores to a world-wide rankings system, but that doesn’t save Ghost Squad. Even the low price and hysterically bad voice acting and dialogue don’t make a positive difference.

The game is just plain dull.

It looks and sounds ok, but one play through and you’ve seen all you need to see. Mindless blasting can be fun, but this is soulless blasting.