Is It Good? Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden 50 Hour Review

[Music] I can't really put my finger on exactly why but banisher ghost of new Eden has sort of flown under the radar which is a shame because I've actually really been enjoying this game and it's honestly exceeded my expectations in some ways even the menu screen was a great first impression and the first few hours of the story definitely hooked me of course it's not perfect and I'll share my critiques with you to give you the full picture but overall I really think bishers is a bit of a Hidden Gem so let's find out if it's for you banisher ghost of new Eden is a single player action RPG with the unique twist in that the story is driven by your choices there are actually five different possible endings depending on the choices you make it's not just a story game though I've been pleasantly surprised by the depth and complexity of the combat system the wide variety of gear with lots of different perks and upgradeable stats a bunch of reseable skills for both red and Ana and a surprisingly large world to explore comparing it to some big titles I would say it plays like a mix of God of War and The Witcher 3 I can see a heavy God of War influence in particular which isn't a bad thing at all if you're familiar with don't nod's other games like vampire and life is strange you'll see elements of those here as well bishers takes place in 1695 in the fictional region of New Eden in colonial America you play as red and Ana a pair of lovers and bishers or basically Ghost Hunters who are trying to solve a particularly vexing and dire case of course I won't spoil any of it but if you've seen any of the trailers then you'll know that antea ends up becoming a ghost herself for most the game and in addition to solving the otherworldly problem plaguing new Eden you're also faced with the brutal decision to either help her Ascend to the afterlife losing her forever or perform a ritual to bring her back from the dead but the costs to do so are terrible and involve making some very tough morally gray decisions through pretty much all the quests you'll be confronted with various people living in the region both living and non-living who are either being haunted doing some haunting or did something terrible to create some type of spirit that's doing some Haunting in each case you'll collect Clues to put together the full picture of what happened and then decide how to deal with the people involved but no one is clearly good or bad so I rarely found myself in a position where I could make an easy decision and your choices have an impact on how the story plays out this decision-based Quest system is definitely a Cornerstone of bishers and it's intended to put you in morally uncomfortable situations which it does well so if you're willing to wait around in the moral gray space for a while I think you'll find bishers Quest system pretty engaging I wouldn't recommend kids play or watch bishers being played though it's not a horror game and it's not really gory or anything but the topics addressed are pretty heavy and disturbing at times outside of dealing with the moral spectrum of characters during quests you're also going to spend a lot of time exploring the world and I'm happy to report there's quite a bit to explore it's not a full open world instead it's wide linear much like God of War you are essentially confined to corridors but they're wide so it doesn't feel too constraining and and more importantly there are tons of branches to explore which makes the world feel pretty big there's also some areas that are more open and some environmental puzzles to solve that require a combination of red and Ana's abilities exploration is generally pretty rewarding too in addition to collecting lots of resources unique to the different regions you can also find special chests with more valuable resources or even a piece of gear there's also things like special combat challenge ritual sites like the one I showed in my combat preview video which reward you with permanent upgrades to your stats and there's even infinite combat Arenas where you can fight boss enemies repeatedly there's some other things too like void breaches which I don't want to spoil and tons of side quests and errands to complete so yeah plenty of things to find around the map I've also enjoyed the challenge of mastering the combat system I started my playthrough on the highest difficulty and it was certainly challenging before I started to get the hang of the mechanics but you can switch difficulties anytime if you get stuck playing as red the basics of movement and combat are very very similar to the modern God of War games there's no jumping and you have a single tap Dodge and double tap roll of course there are also basic light and heavy attacks and you've got a block and Parry as well but the block doesn't actually block all damage you'll still take a little bit and the Parry timing is quite tight so I think most players will have an easier time learning to move around the battlefield with a single tap Dodge as you land hits you build up orange banish points towards a full charge that can be used for a powerful banish move you also build up blue Spirit points that fuel Ana's attacks like her Outburst ability and red has a rifle for ranged attacks switching between the two is definitely important to be successful in combat and Ana is quite powerful more so than red in some ways I've really enjoyed the Dual character aspect of combat there's plenty of basic enemies around the map that respawn and a good number of unique bosses and mini bosses to take on during quests if you want more details on how the combat works you can check out my exclusive combat preview video in the pin comment below where where I cover the essential mechanics and show a live combat demo and you'll also want to keep an eye out for my full combat guide coming soon there's also a bunch of different gear over 80 pieces that you can use to create a build that works for your play style something I really like here is that there's no trash gear just like God of War every piece of gear you get either from quests merchants or exploring can be upgraded to level seven Relic Rarity each piece of gear has a set of stats that contribute to red and Ana's overall attributes and a special perk that helps shape your play style many of the gear items will start above level one when you get them too the various skills also offer a lot of customizability you'll unlock a total of five skill trees through main story progression each centered around one of Ana's special abilities called manifestations there are red skills for you guessed it red and blue skills for antea but many of them like the series of perfect switch ones are designed around using both characters you can also Respec skills anytime if you decide you don't like one or want to adjust your build for the situation you're in between skills and gear there's a lot of potential to create different builds which I really like graphically I feel the game is pretty solid and there have been some instances where I've actually been quite impressed particularly landscape views and the quality of lighting in many of the main cutcenes environmental objects are fairly detailed and varied for example buildings feel individually crafted and not copypaste versions of a few based models vegetation foliage is a bit geometric and flat looking at times but it's honestly better than a lot of games even big ones with much larger budgets and I personally think it looks pretty good I've been playing on PS5 using the performance mode which targets 60 FPS there's also a resolution mode that targets 30 FPS honestly I don't see much of a quality difference between the two and I always prefer the smoothness of 60 FPS so it's nice you're not sacrificing much going from resolution to Performance mode now I've definitely seen some instances where the frame rate drops below 60 and I I've also seen some minor stutters and dropped frames but it really hasn't been anything too bad certainly no crashes plus there will be a day one patch that I expect will make the game even more stable I have had some minor to moderate glitches like a texture for text on a wall just rendering as white blocks and one time where a character model bugged out in a weird way in that particular instance it also prevented me from completing the side quest and I had to travel to another area and come back to get it to reset I've also had a couple instances where enemies go invisible on on me with just their health bar remaining though I can still fight them the one major bug I had was during a boss fight when the enemies turned invisible and I couldn't attack them at all I couldn't complete the fight and actually had to reload from Save and do it over so that one was fairly bad but again I've been playing on a pre-release build and there's a good chance things like this will be fixed in the launch version if not soon after launch there are some things I don't like that I don't expect to change though and the variability in facial animations is one most of the facial animations for main character are pretty good certainly good enough to where I didn't think about them when watching cutcenes but I think less attention was paid to some of the characters for side content some of them just look stiffer but they really aren't that bad I've also noticed the ambient music Loop has a pretty abrupt end not a huge deal but definitely breaks immersion a bit when it happens but there's also been long stretches while I'm exploring where no music played at all not sure if that's a bug but I think it would be really nice to have some ambient music while running around sometimes but the big thing I don't like is the souls-like approach to how healing works when you die you respawn with however much health you had at the game's last autosave which could be as low as 33% to heal you need to consume potions which you can only hold three of at the start and you won't get too many more than that both of those things are pretty typical but the problem is the only way to get more potions is to rest at a shelter and you can't fast travel to a shelter from anywhere on the map you can only fast travel between shelters so if you're out in the wilds and low on on healing you have to run back to a shelter and sometimes they're pretty far away of course you could lower the difficulty to get through a fight but if you're like me you don't want to have to lower the difficulty simply because you don't want to run back a few minutes all the way back to a shelter to get some potions now I did confirm with the devs that this is the intended Behavior but they also told me that my problem was exacerbated because I was playing on the highest difficulty the lower your difficulty is the higher chance you'll be granted health potions when you die I did test this out on normal difficulty and and it definitely feels much more balanced so you may not notice it much depending on the difficulty you play on and to be fair for any major boss fights you'll be given full health potions before it starts I just really wish you could fast travel to shelters from anywhere on the map with some sort of fast travel pack I'll also admit the overall structure of quests started to feel a little repetitive to me but that's honestly probably just because I personally don't love Gathering a lot of information and clues it's just not my favorite sort of quest structure personally but I can recognize it's done well here the mid game also felt a little slow from a narrative standpoint I think this was due to a combination of the story starting off with a bang and naturally slowing down a bit as you start to work your way through it and my personal tendency to spend a bunch of time trying to explore everywhere so I did go for long stretches without any narrative progression which is certainly on me so don't get me wrong the main story is quite good I just felt like it lost steam a little bit at times I did really like how many of the stories told during Main and side quest tie into the main narrative at the end during side quests you'll learn more about the backstory and what's been going on with the main narrative and completing some of them even has a tangible effect on the world so both of those aspects of the quest system are pretty cool so don't get too hung up on these critiques outside of my desire to have fast travel from anywhere most of my critiques are pretty minor and I've honestly been having fun playing and I do think if you like the premise of the game there's a very good chance you will too it's rated to be about 25 to 30 hours long but I've got about 45 in so far and VB who joined me in early access has over 70 and neither of us are done with everything plus with five different story endings there's a pretty good replay Factor too as a self-reported doublea title I really feel bishers punches above its weight class and can hang with some of the AAA games out there in terms of quality storytelling gameplay and Graphics of course it's not going to go head-to-head with juggernauts like God of War horizon or Final Fantasy but it's a quality game that I would recommend to anyone interested in a story-driven RPG 7.5 out of 10 for me and I'd upgrade that to an eight if the bugs and other things I mentioned can get cleaned up if you want to check out more of the combat you can head over to my combat preview video right here and subscribe to make sure you don't miss my upcoming videos chocked full of things I wish I knew before starting thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Arktix

Views: 13,541

Keywords: artix, arctix, banishers ghosts of new eden, bansisher ghosts of new eden, banishers gne, gameplay, review

Id: 08W9s-qNGVg

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024