Ghost of Tsushima takes place on Tsushima Island, a real-life island situated between Japan and South Korea. But is it actually great, or was the hype simply too much to cut through? People consider Ghost of Tsushima to be the last great PlayStation 4 exclusive, now that the PS5’s just around the corner. For all of the game’s sense of scale and cinematic sweep, these are superficial aesthetics that come at the expense of gameplay.Ghost Of Tsushima Review OctoJack Lowry - No Comments Choosing this setting lets you play the game like a classic black-and-white samurai movie (even if I must argue that Kurosawa’s greatest masterpiece is Ran, which was shot in colour), which looks terrific until you find yourself lost among the crowd or fail to read the signals to dodge or parry, which appear as coloured glints on an enemy’s weapon. The fundamental problem with Tsushima can be best summed up by its Kurosawa mode. There are interesting ideas such as learning to use different stances against specific enemy types, but you’ll also have to fight against the absence of a manual targeting system and a wayward camera more interested in spectacle than function. It’s at its best when you’re fighting in one-on-one duels set to an epic backdrop, or when challenging your first enemy to a Stand-off with the same tension of a showdown in a Western.īut these are also just a fraction of your encounters since most of Tsushima‘s combat involves taking on mobs that are in turn messy and an irritating exercise in attrition. And in the year of our Lord 2020, why are there still tailing missions?įor players put off by the masochistic difficulty of Nioh or Sekiro, the good news is that combat is on the more forgiving side, where kills and parries are rewarded with resolve gauges that can be spent on healing or special attacks. Yet even though you’re supposed to be able to mix up samurai and ghost playstyles, you’re also frequently forced into stealth situations with insta-fail penalties. Worse are the hackneyed stealth mechanics, which you’ll find yourself using just to alleviate from overwhelming combat situations. Traversal feels straight out of an Uncharted game, where climbing cliffs or using a grapple hook have obvious prescribed paths – hardly what you’d expect in an open world game. This is most apparent when you’re surveying an enemy encampment, which initially seems like it’s going to give you multiple options only for it to fall to one set solution. Yet the missions themselves are rigidly linear in design. But it’s an indecisive approach, where sometimes the lack of navigation has you running around lost, while in another instance the wind blows aggressively against you when you deviate just slightly off course.īetween the main objective, you’ll discover secrets, liberate villages, and more interestingly help allies in their own tales, many which run in parallel to the campaign. It does try to remove the usual open world clutter by having an unsubtle wind guide you to your objective instead of waypoints, while speaking to people might alert you to points of interest that appear on the world map.
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