Good: Good graphics and level design, cool story and theme, action gameplay
Bad: Poor performance/hitbox registering, lack of customization/ easy character availability, limited game modes
Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 7
Performance: 5
Overall: 6
We recently checked out Nexon’s open beta of their futuristic FPS title Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – First Assault Online (yes we think it’s quite a mouthful as well); a free to play title where you get to step into the shoes of the characters from the well-known anime series Ghost in the Shell. The show is set in the future where people can augment their bodies with cybernetics, in doing so the populous has made themselves susceptible to being hacked by cyber-terrorists and so a special division of cybernetic soldiers and police has been devised to tackle this growing threat.
Stepping into the game a lot of that theme is lost; you do get some of the characters from the show and one of their token abilities, which comes in the form of a unique Q skill that each player/character must build up over the course of combat filling up a gauge. At the halfway point you get to use your skill, infra-red that can see through walls, creating energy barriers, going into an invisible-ish stealth mode, and other cool stuff; however getting your gauge maxed out not only improves the ability but also allows you to share it with other players/character that otherwise might not have that skill.
Beyond a few semi-familiar looking areas that have been designed for the nine available maps, the game unfortunately feels like a fairly typical FPS and the characters lack the types of acrobatic movement we’d expect from Ghost in the Shell, and we’d have loved to see as they leap around buildings, climb walls, and well, something more than what we already have in every other FPS that comes from Asia. The lack of mobility means a relatively simple map design in terms of verticality, there’s no large buildings to scale with numerous vantage points, and whilst most of the maps are relatively small, we will at least say they look great and do capture the theme and setting far better than the combat mechanics do.
Continuing the trend of “fairly typical FPS” we take a look at the game modes. There is a newly introduced survival mode with one person in stealth fighting other players dressed up as cyborgs, and of course classic PVP modes: standard Team Deathmatch, Demolition (one team plants a bomb at one of two locations whilst the other tries to defuse it, with no respawns after death) or Terminal Conquest where you need to capture various points to win the game. That’s it. Three primary game modes and a survival mode, with maps locked to specific modes (and as we don’t like non-objective focused modes such as Team Deathmatch that drops our maps to 6 in total). For a modern day FPS that is extremely poor and after a while doing the same game modes on the same maps does start to feel a little bit boring.
This issue is further exacerbated, especially for new players, by the fact that aside from your first choice all the characters are locked and you have to earn XP and currency to unlock them if you want to play them (which takes a while to get if you want the full roster of nine characters). For a long time you are playing with the same character with no facility to switch classes as you would find with other FPSs, having to essentially grind to unlock what other games provide from the outset.
With your character comes a fairly restrictive customization feature, when starting out you have a pistol, melee weapon, grenade and one of three interchangeable primary weapons: Sniper Rifle, Assault Rifle and SMG, which you can switch between after each death in a match. By levelling up your gear from using it you gain access to new weapons (just different variations on the main three primary weapons), with options to augment your weapon in various ways. The issue is that this all comes very slowly and so not only are you stuck with a single character (who only has a different Q from the next character, the rest of their kit is fairly similar), but you have the same gear for a long time, and you’re playing the same three game modes.
The result of all the above is that gameplay stagnates very quickly early on, don’t get us wrong the combat is pretty fun and maps and modes that are available are entertaining, we just don’t think it has enough originality to have the staying power. Combined with some awful performance issues where the hitbox detection was really off, or there was some constant server lag, so often we found ourselves being attacked, getting behind cover where the enemy could no longer hit us, and then still dying (presumably enemy side we were still visible). Similarly we found a number of times we’d unload a full clip at someone’s head and they’d still somehow manage to survive, and then quickly one hit kill us.
It’s a shame that more wasn’t done to take the theme and run with it, make it more than a copy/paste of other games and thinking that the theme and the skill sharing system was enough of a concept to carry the game to success. The grind, lack of customization (at least early game), restricted characters and lack of unique game modes or variety just means you are left with a somewhat decent look game with a cool theme that never quite hit its potential.
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