Preview: Ghost in the Shell First Assault
When you’re booting up a new free to play shooting game; you need to be prepared with the knowledge that if you have ever played a different free shooter, you have played the one you are about to boot up. This is simply because of archaic notion of film genres has been applied to video games as if they were the same thing, and most gamers get quite verbally violent if you try to dissuade them from this cover-based assumption.
Take the RPG genre for example. In the early 90’s, an RPG placed the player in a fictional world, made them figure out puzzles, explore, etc while they built up their character. Nowadays if you have progressing stats and an inventory; you are an RPG no questions asked. This focus on what players see is why the requirements of video games on our computers goes up every year, but the relative complexity of the game isn’t that much more intense than their older counterparts.
And then you have shooting games, the easiest to craft video game genre of the age. This is because all you have to literally do is take the stock Unity engine assets, lay down some walls and floors, and you have your prototype in an hour or two. Most commercial engines were designed primarily for a first person shooting game, so it should not come to much surprise that most companies churn them out yearly. And it does not help that the videogames industry acts a lot like a war; whatever works best ends up getting adopted by everybody else as the new standard.
I’m venting about this because I end up picking up new free to play shooters pretending like I am going to experience something amazingly new that will make me happy to call myself a hardcore gamer keeping up on his trends. Instead…. I got Ghost in the Shell First Assault; a by the numbers online shooter with skins and art based on the Ghost in the Shell anime franchise.
The main characters of Ghost in the Shell are cyborg ex-military special detectives belonging to Section 9, a counter-terrorist strike unit that doubles as government detectives. The show deals mostly with sociological philosophy. The first GITS movie asks us what is a man, the TV series Stand Alone Complex (Both seasons) is disturbingly relevant to today’s politics. In addition to it’s (mostly) full body cyborg team, they have access to miniaturized AI battle tanks for high threat situations. The game First Assault is what happens when you get hired to make a video game, ignore all the story, and focus on the “Tanks and Cyborgs” part in development.
You pick a character with a shooter game inspired ability (With the exception of the Major, whose camouflage ability made it in game), and compete in team deathmatch, control point, and bombing run missions like common infantry. Your team always appears like the characters they are playing, while the enemy appears as generic bad guys in red. Now, I would normally consider this to be clever but considering how besides their abilities every character behaves the same, it just makes you feel like there’s not much point in picking a character at all.
The guns are standard modern military stuff like AK47’s and such, but can be outfitted with several customizations to minorly affect the weapons handling. Anything recognizable from the show besides handguns simply aren’t present. The other thing that bugs me is the absence of ammunition types when they are so crucial to the setting. Then again, that would require the dev’s to have heard of a strange alien concept called “armor”.
The main character “Major” Kusanagi is a full body cyborg with a titanium chassis; which the game seems to be assuming absolutely everybody is (No blood here, people just break into robot parts). Entire episodes of the TV show are based around the fact that small arms fire is extremely ineffective against full bodied cyborgs, with the exception of “High Velocity” armor piercing rounds. Nobody short of the military has routine access to anti-cyborg weaponry; and Section 9 usually has to call in favors to borrow such toys. In First Assault, you die in three shots or one headshot; and most quizzically you can die by getting shot in the body.
So we’ve got a game that mimics the standard match types, borrows the appeal of GITS while doing little to replicate it, and seems to be perfectly fine with that. The attitude of the dev’s is pretty obvious from their development posts; one of which where they lament the artist produced a Think-Tank design with a gun on it’s tail, and this would grant them a third weapon so it’s out of the question…. Despite such a design starring in one of the first episodes of the show.
But what must bother me most is how this get’s a free pass from it’s audience where other games like the infamous Shadowrun PC/Xbox game that reduces the license to a match based shooter modeled after counter-strike; yet I don’t see anywhere near the kind of flak that Shadowrun got despite doing the same thing yet worse. I ended up having fun at first because I got kills, then comes the realization that either camping or superior reflexes is the sole factor. This ended up losing it’s fun factor quite quickly, making me just want to watch the anime rather than this game.
There is a slight chance this game can clean up it’s act given time. If you are trying to come into this game expecting a Ghost in the Shell experience then you have been baited and switched like I was. First Assault is just another match based shooter glorifying sniper rifles as a weapon used in close quarters engagements. You might have some fun at first, but you can get that same thrill in any other free shooter. The whole draw of this game is that it’s like every other game, and that bothers me.
