Ghostwire Tokyo Review

"Ghost in the City"

Campaign

March 21, 2022 at 7:00am
By Jason Stettner

This is a rather strange sort of dipping into horror while definitely being a psychological thriller sort of experience. It’s also a first person finger shooting game with magic spells and wild supernatural elements. It’s best experienced fresh without a full understanding of the story as it’s just wild to understand as things progress.

That aside, the just of this is a straight forward story of old. The hero’s tale of attempting to save one that’s important to them, with a bit of messed up supernatural magic thrown in. Basically you’re playing as this guy who’s sister has been taken by a mysteriously masked guy and this mystical being has latched onto you in order to assist.

It’s at least several hours in length for the main story, with plenty of extra side missions and activities to take part in if you so choose. Probably providing I’d say a max of twenty hours or so if you wanted to do everything. I didn’t find anything too difficult to handle so I imagine time line wise it should be similar for others.

Anyways, the missions play almost linear in design. They then throw you out into the open world slice of Tokyo where regular people no longer linger. It’s just these messed up ghostly figures. You’re free to move around and it becomes more open the further you go along which is quite interesting.

You open areas by unlocking gates, and it was all rather intriguing to discover. It’s quite alluring, and stuffed with things to do which wasn’t something I anticipated. Going back to the narrative I quite liked the contained setup of this tale.

It was straight forward, but filled with a sense of mystery and well paced action. There were good performances from the main characters, some emotional beats and the delivery was well executed. After the main narrative completion you have the opportunity to continue playing from the point of no return, thought that was worth mentioning.

Gameplay

As mentioned, you use finger blasting guns to shoot magical spells. It’s first person with third person cinematics. You have a few core spells, a special bow and some other unique options for attacking enemies. You need to use a balance of abilities to damage foes and then usually extract their cores.

You can improve skills as well along the way since you’re leveling up while playing. The skills system isn’t super in-depth but it offers many ways to improve your abilities across your journey. There are other elements that add to this such as special beads to gain boosts or food and items to buy from local cat shops.

On top of that if you care there are some cosmetic character clothing choices to be made. The world is quite open to explore. You can climb vertically fairly easily to reach the top of skyscrapers using either stairs or these flying creatures. Then you can glide around for a bit, it’s actually quite cool to do so. The city is also just filled to the brim with smaller details.

Each area has trash littering the streets, small little corners to visit or other secrets to find. It’s actually quite impressive and I wish I had more time reviewing wise to dive into that as there was so much to see. It really did feel lively, despite it being a dead town since there’s just weird supernatural things flowing throughout the streets.


When it comes to graphical options there are six which is quite impressive. It’s actually future proofed as well which is really neat to see, I’d like other games to offer similar options. All selections have HDR and these visual choices can be altered on the fly. The first choice is Quality Mode that provides a 4k resolution at 30fps.

This mode also features ray traced reflections and improved visual effects. The Performance Mode was my preference for most of the experience. It provided I believe a dynamic 4k resolution quite a bit lower at 60fps with ray tracing being swapped out for spatial reflections. The next four modes are essentially variations on these choices.

HFR (High Frame Rate) is the push for them. HFR Quality provides the same experience but with 60fps as a target which is doesn’t hit close to. Then there’s HFR Performance which provides the same as regular named mode but at an uncapped frame rate above 60fps. Then there’s the two choices with VSync enabled which helps smooth these modes out.

The developers are apparently smoothing these options further with updates but anything HFR was all over the place frame rate wise with screen tearing and other aspects I wasn’t huge on. Performance mode was largely fine, but also exhibited some performance drops. Quality mode felt sluggish, but seemed to hold its target with neat visual effects being present.

The Conclusion

Ghostwire Tokyo is a great supernatural finger blasting psychological thriller filled with wild action and the odd dog petting. It featured excellent pacing and a sense of intrigue that created desire for me to explore the open world. That area is filled to the brim with things to do and places to see.

There are a range of enemies to remove from their earthly inhabitance and you get to feel really cool while doing so. The story is straight forward and confined, yet that was exactly what I was looking for at this time. It was really fun to play, had some messed up moments that went on and it was neat.

It wasn’t necessarily scary at all, but it had some eerie feelings to it and a style that kept me intrigued as I played. It’s got a good emotional beat to the heart of it, while still having awesome ghost blasting action. There really were some cool attacks, great combos and strange times to be had. A ghostly psychological thriller for the ages. Really, it did something entirely new with the shooter genre and I loved it.

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Ghostwire Tokyo Review on Playstation 5
Review Code Provided by 47

Rating Overall: 8.7