Ghostwire: Tokyo review – an incredible setting let down by repetitive mission design
None of the spirits in Ghostwire: Tokyo like their jobs. Some strong emotion is binding them to the world of the living, and for many that emotion is hate – hatred for their job, their colleagues, their boss, the fact they didn’t get that promotion, or how they wasted their life grinding in the rat race of the nine-to-five. There aren’t many games as openly critical of capitalism as this, with its greedy landlords and porky salarymen ghosts who drop money instead of magical energy when they die (again). It’s just a shame the game often feels like work itself.
It opens with everyone in Shibuya spirited away, their souls ejected from their bodies as they’re touched by some ghostly fog. You play as an everyman called Akito, who survives this event thanks to the spirit of a ghost hunter – known as K.K. – who latches onto him like a parasite, imbuing Akito with supernatural powers. Like the streets of Toyko, the main character is literally haunted.
Everyone in Ghostwire: Tokyo is haunted, in fact — haunted by their own failings, haunted by ghosts, haunted by the loss of a loved one. And the game itself is haunted, too — haunted by vapid open-world game design. It’s a shame because it looks good, it sounds good, it feels good, but repetitive side tasks and by-the-numbers mission design drags the whole thing down.
Ghostwire: Tokyo is a map game. You wander around a wonderfully realized Tokyo collecting items, petting dogs, and fighting ghosts. And that’s all there is to it. There are yokai to chase down or sneak up on, there are angry spirits to exorcise, and there are innocent spirits to save… so many of them. The fog keeps you penned in, peeling back and revealing another new piece of the map whenever you cleanse a torii gate, each time unlocking more icons representing more side missions and more collectibles.
Every rooftop, alleyway, and street is filled with ghosts to liberate, sucking them up in little paper men before depositing them at a phone booth. Every deposit nets you XP, allowing you to level up your powers. Thanks to the ability to climb, grapple, jump, and glide between Tokyo’s rooftops, it feels akin to a first-person Crackdown at times – it manages to tap into that same kleptomaniac part of your brain but doesn’t have the same exciting movement that makes the act of collecting them feel rewarding in and of itself.
It feels like Tango Gameworks – the studio behind The Evil Within and its sequel, a brilliant survival horror series – looked at what sells. Action sells. Open world games sell. You can even see it in the game’s collectible clothing and emotes – they feel superfluous in a single-player game where you see through the character’s eyes, but Fortnite sells, so let’s tick the box anyway.
The actual core of the game is solid. Movement is a little stiff (particularly if you play in Fidelity Mode), but the combat is stylish and slick. Fighting faceless salarymen, headless schoolgirls, and toothy horrors, you fire off elemental spells from your hands. Wind-powered magical knives slice, arcs of water are like a shotgun spray of crowd control, and fire-powered balls of energy blast holes right through vengeful spirits. Tap the block button and an energy shield protects you from incoming attacks, allowing for parries if you time it right. Stagger an enemy and you can perform a Doom-style Glory Kill, ripping out their spectral cores with cat’s cradle-esque hand motions, tying them up in a lasso of pure energy before yanking them away. Stagger multiple enemies together and you can finish them all in one slick movement – all of this backed by gagaku EDM.
Outside of the hand gestures, you’ve got talismans that act as magical grenades and a bow and arrow, allowing for ranged stealth kills. Occasionally you’re separated from K.K. and forced to use only the bow and melee stealth takedowns, but these sections don’t last long, thankfully.
Played on PS5’s DualSense, every action feels tactile and satisfying. Unfortunately, once you’ve spent dozens of hours scouring Tokyo for collectibles, the combat just becomes something you want to finish as quickly and efficiently as possible – something in the way. The first time you’re dropkicked in the face by a headless school kid, it’s brilliant. Not so much by the 100th. It’s also not challenging enough to carry the game – in fact, I died once during my entire playthrough and it was just because I wasn’t paying attention (this death served a purpose, however, because it highlighted another issue: poor checkpointing).
As I said before, you can grapple up to rooftops and jump and glide across the map – the most vertical playground outside of the Dying Light series – and this is a good way to avoid conflict when exploring the open world. But doing so takes away from Ghostwire: Tokyo’s most redeeming quality: the vibe.
Exploring Tokyo at street level is pure virtual tourism. It’s one of the best-looking games (games that are shooting for realism, at least) we’ve seen so far this generation. Rain-slick and neon-lit, shop lights reflect in every puddle. It’s not just how it looks or the sheer attention to detail Tango Gameworks put into replicating its hometown, though – it’s the sounds. Like I say, it’s a vibe.
Music fades in and out as you pass hostess clubs, only to be replaced with the jingle from a cat food advert on the radio of a convenience store, which is quickly replaced by the jangle of a nearby arcade – it’s a sensory delight, especially with 3D audio-capable cans on. I often had to stop to admire the way raindrops hit glass while listening to them patter all around me, only to be interrupted by a headless school kid dropkicking me in the face.
I know I’ve been down on the game for much of this review, but Ghostwire: Tokyo isn’t terrible. Combat is good, it looks and sounds amazing, the setting is refreshing, and some of the little stories you uncover are interesting. It’s also a worthwhile celebration of Japanese culture, stuffed full of urban legends and other cultural quirks.
I’m thankful that the review code came in early because it’s a game to be played part-time, taken a bit at a time, rather than putting in a double shift. If Tango Gameworks ever gets the chance to work on a sequel and manages to create more varied, exciting missions, it could be something special. For now, it‘s more of a vocation than a vacation.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.