UK, August 23, 2007 - Light gun games are a perfect fit for Wii. Although using the Wii-mote as a deadly weapon to take down a stream of enemies,
may not be the most innovative of uses for Nintendo's waggle-tastic creation, it's certainly one of the most fun. Something we can whole-heartedly attest to after some extended play time with
Ghost Squad. In fact, the SEGA PR showing us the title practically had to wrestle the remote from our clammy terrorist-shooting hand after we'd managed to blast our way through two of the opening levels.
But first we'll start with a little background on Ghost Squad to get your trigger fingers twitching and your anticipation juices flowing.
The Wii version is pretty much identical to the arcade game that's been swallowing coins for years but with a few Wii-specific additions here and there. You play as a member of an elite squad of commandos called the Ghost Squad, who are tasked with bringing down potentially dangerous terrorists with a range of lethal weaponry. The only negotiations here are whether you pop just one bullet in their head or spray them with hot lead from a machine gun - just the kind of negotiations we like.
The first level we played was set in a log cabin deep in the woods. Unfortunately the cabin was home to a host of tooled-up mercenaries and their hostages. So, we had to run in with all guns blazing, shooting enemies as they popped out. You control the game just using the pointing function of the Wii-mote because movement is on-rails, so you don't have to worry about it. Instead you just have to worry about quickly blasting enemies as they appear from behind desks, chairs, tables... and pretty much anywhere you could hide a man dressed in full combat fatigues. In fact, sometimes they even slide across the floor in front of you, shooting as they go.
Of course, quick reactions are a must if you want to be successful in Ghost Squad because if you take enemies down quickly you're awarded bonus points. Likewise if you pull off a sweet headshot you also get a few extra marks. Both of these are vital if you want to get a high grade for the mission and it always helps to be quick on the draw so that enemies don't have too much time to fire shots in your direction.
Thankfully the Wii controls are extremely responsive, which means you can easily zip your aiming reticule about the screen blasting anything that gets in your way.
However, there are some times when you've got to make sure you're not overly trigger happy, otherwise you could kill innocent members of the public or hostages that the terrorists have kidnapped.
As you go through the levels, you often come to sections with branching paths for you to select. In one case we could rescue a bunch of hostages, take out all the enemies in an area or lob a smoke grenade into a room then burst in shooting. After some deliberation we opted for the latter and it's a good job we did because it was really rather exciting. As soon as we chucked the smoke bomb into the room, it was cloaked in a deep fog which meant we couldn't see anything and had to rely on our thermal goggles to show the outlines of terrorists. However, the problem is that everyone looks the same when using goggles (red/yellow shapes) so you've got to be careful not to shoot hostages that pop up alongside the terrorists. Thankfully, innocents are indicated by a little 'help' icon that appears over their heads but in the heat of the moment, you've got to be careful not to miss this.
As well as offering pretty standard on-rails shooting,
there are also special events in Ghost Squad that require the use of different weapons - and we got to sample two of these during our hands-on. The first was a sniper section when we had a limited time to take out terrorists only using head-shots. This
was actually quite a tense moment because we were always conscious of the time and this wasn't helped by the fact we had to slowly reload after every shot, so we had to make sure each one counted. The next event was a boss battle against a helicopter. Here we had to use a rocket launcher that could lock onto the copter if we kept the gun sight hovering over it for long enough. Of course, this is easier said than done because it was flying about and shooting at us. Eventually we did bring it down but no one at the SEGA booth seemed happy to give us a big high five to celebrate.
So, that pretty much wrapped it up for our hands-on and
we must admit that this was actually one of the games that we enjoyed the most during Games Convention. It's perfect quick-fix arcade action that works brilliantly for the Wii Remote.
Yes, it may not be Metroid Prime 3 or Super Mario Galaxy, but Ghost Squad certainly seems to be shaping up as one of Wii's must-have titles.
