Spirit of Impotence
Ghost Rider succeeds in being better than most licensed games, but not by much.
Published: February 25, 2007
Bike issues aside, GR actually plays fairly well. The combo system is nice enough that by the end you have a nice suite of moves you can tap, and they're easy to pull off with minimal memorization. Thing is, you really only need one or two moves to sail through the game, though of course if you do that, you're pussing out and just spamming your way through things, but the temptation is certainly there when the depth of the gameplay is enter room>spawn enemies>kill all enemies>leave room>repeat.
There's also one other issue with the whole upgrades system -- combat or otherwise: by the time you're on the last level, I would be shocked if you hadn't unlocked everything possible in the Caretaker's Shop. Comic pages, behind-the-scenes clips, all moves, health upgrades, super moves, concept art, movie stills -- all of it can be had fairly quickly and easily. You'll have to beat the game thrice to actually unlock everything, but aside from getting cameo character Blade, who plays quite a bit differently from Ghosty, all the rest are really just model swaps.
As I mentioned before, I've no doubt that the folks at Climax had the ability to whip up some incredibly cool ideas (just looking at the artwork unlocks and behind-the-scenes stuff will prove that), but whether because of the dual approvals process of Marvel and Columbia, or because of staff size/experience/talent, or just the amount of time the development team had, it doesn't quite look like the game they sketched out, and the length is a reflection of that.
It's in smaller things, too, like the jumpy framerate (get more than three guys on screen and things take a dive) and so-so animation. The movie's sort of Horror Western theme was echoed quite well in the game, and for what it's worth, the art and design folks did a wonderful job coaxing some nicely detailed level designs out of the RenderWare engine. Things like invisible walls and limited interaction with the environment, however, really saps a lot of the intricacy from the world created.
Equally sparse and inconsistent is the audio. There are only a handful of action themes when enemies spawn, and they range from tolerable to grating and repetitive. It's a shame, too, because some of the non-battle stuff does aptly capture the mix of western and spooky tones that the game was going for. Having four enemies spawn, all with the same sound and animation just sort of kills things slowly too. In fact, due to there being just a few enemy types per level, there's a lot of repetition aurally. Minimal sound-alike (and I don't mean the blah faux Sam Elliot) voice acting doesn't really do the game many favors.
Perhaps in a telling display of either what the PSP is capable of or the high water mark of the PS2 version, both games actually look almost identical. The PSP framerate is dodgier, and memory constraints meant that the PSP version has a weird gating system where you clear enemies, then step into the checkpoint so it can spawn more, but the PSP actually comes out ahead a little in that it has challenges for each level that add a little more replay value, plus more unlocks. Aside from some remapped controls on the PSP that use the d-pad in lieu of shoulder buttons the games otherwise are remarkably close to one another.
As I said before, Ghost Rider isn't a bad game. It's not a terribly good game either, but Climax managed to pull off a mildly entertaining game that apes concepts from action games that got it right. It's neither as deep nor as satisfying as any of the games it bites the style from, but it doesn't do them such a disservice that the game is rendered painful either. It's just sort of... there, existing without doing much to give pause or reason to like it. As a rental, the game might be a brief distraction, and some of the unlockable art and comics are fun to peek over, but unless you can find the game for $5-10 in a bargain bin somewhere in a few months, it's not worth owning.
