Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden2024

[copied by Steam] Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden doesn’t reinvent the action RPG wheel, doesn’t screw much around it, and still rolls pretty solid. Fans of the newer Assassins Creeds, God of War(s) and the Horizon series can draw parallels and find their way around directly. We take on the role of veteran Scotsman Red McRaith, who along with his partner Antea Duarte in colonial North America in the late 17th century. The century operates. As so-called "banishers" (banners), they specialize in exorcising ghosts. The action begins with a tragic mishap in the eponymous settlement of New Eden, where Red involuntarily ends Antea’s life. From now on, Antea is a ghost herself, which opens up an existential dilemma: Red must decide whether to banish his partner to the spirit world to ensure her peace of mind, or whether to sacrifice the people of New Eden to bring her back to life. This central moral dichotomy forms the core of the game. The stories of the haunted inhabitants, which are rolled up in the so-called Spiritual Investigations, are consistently haunted and deal with universal psychological and interpersonal themes such as revenge, forbidden love, greed and acceptance of transience. The depressed and melancholy mood is convincingly transported by the excellent performance of the English voice actors. As indicated at the beginning, the combat system follows an established scheme. It is a reactionary action combat system with a focus on blocking, parrying and evasion. The enemy types, primarily ghosts ("Schemes") and some wildlife/fantastic creatures, have different attack patterns but rarely pose a tactical challenge. The charm lies in the interplay between Red and Antea; Red acts as a robust melee fighter with tank-like abilities and physical attacks. Antea uses her ghost form for stunlocks and elemental damage from a distance or by surface damage. The skilltree is clearly structured and unlocks new abilities in the course of the main action depending on the context. The equipment and collection system (with numerous collectibles) offers a variety of buffs and debuffs, but the opponent strength only minimally scales with the player progress. This means that once found, effective item sets are often sufficient for the rest of the game, which reduces motivation to experiment. The world is quite open but divided into smaller sections by small corridors, rock walls, rock outcrops and caves, comparable to the newer God of War. This is one of the biggest problems of the game. You have to do an incredible amount of backtracking, be it for the almost infinite number of collectibles or missions. Every 200 meters you have to squeeze through small corridors or hang along somewhere, which takes 30 seconds every time and extremely takes the flow out of the game and demotivates in part quite long distances already somewhat. Fast travel points are unfortunately sparse and also illogically distributed. So it may happen that you sometimes sit for several hours on side quests, which you could have done loosely and easily, with less back (and forward) tracking in a few minutes because you have to run untrue five times through the same empty area to complete quest sections. Graphically, Banishers gets the most out of one of the first versions of Unreal Engine 5 without being too resource-eating. Although there is no dynamic change of day and night and also the weather changes only in predetermined areas, which makes the world seem a bit static, since there is also no NPC outside the few settlements. Still, Banishers looks incredibly good and benefits from chic baked-in lighting effects and coherently designed environments in a new world setting. Only the gamer yellow marked places where you can climb or interact would not have had to be. Stable 120fps to 1440p (4070ti, R7 7700x, 32gb Ram). In the end, I can only say; Banishers is an action RPG walking sim with great stories. For $50 I might wait again, unless you can’t get enough of Action-RPG’s. For the narrow price of 20€ in the sale (possibly even less) you get at least 40h of the best action-RPG content of recent years. A few corners and edges can be pained by the great story and the nice setting. Eurojank has never looked so good and has rarely been so much fun. .

Translated from German·Show original