Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden Review – GHASTLY EXORCISING!

Don’t Nod has produced a surprisingly solid array of titles over the years. From the original Life is Strange to 2018’s Vampyr, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden opts for yet another emotionally resonant tale, featuring some of the most ghoulishly, gratifying gameplay mechanics we’ve seen since Capcom’s, Ghost Trick in 2010. Although, does it bring enough overall quality to stand out in a market saturated with similar open-world, action RPGs? Well, yes and no.

Losing Thy Religion

The titular banishers are our two lead protagonists, Antea Duarte and Red mac Raith (yep, that’s a ghost pun). They go about sending on any lingering spirits that are starting to cause a ruckus around New Eden. Early on in the game, Antea is mortally wounded by an evil witch rather unceremoniously and soon reunites with her partner, Red. Except this time, she’s a g-g-g-ghost! Not only does this open some unique gameplay opportunities, but—as I’m sure you can tell—this immediately puts Red in an extremely awkward ethics dilemma. Does he accept his duty of guiding Antea’s spirit on? Or does he make a teensy, tiny exception for the love of his life? And, perhaps bring her back from the dead, with other people’s lives in the process? These are some of the grave decisions *wink-wink* that each player will have to make.

As this sombre tale unfolds, our two leads will also attempt to solve different ‘plagues’ or ‘curses’ across the map, with some decent investigation sections for both the main and side story quests to complete. They mostly revolve around inspecting nearby evidence and waiting for Red and Antea to stop talking, as they love commenting on everything they can. But at their core, they can fall between certain issues like infidelity, deceit, mutiny or murder—all the way up to possession and even body sharing. Yep, you heard that right!

However, as intriguing as these topics or concepts may seem, I often found myself staring a hole into my monitor while the rest of the cast droned on and on about things that should be interesting, but ultimately weren’t captivating enough to hold my attention. It just doesn’t reach the lofty heights it sets out to achieve, unfortunately. You may find it more interesting than I do, but don’t blame me if you fall asleep in your chair. After all is said and done though, the story shines brightest when the spotlight is on Red and Antea, as the way they delicately bounce between blissful banter and serious subject matter is mighty impressive. Red’s Scottish accent is also just top-tier, I must say.

It Takes Two to Tango

Along their 25-hour journey of ethics, Red and Antea will take turns tag-teaming ghosts, using their combined prowess for different effects in and out of combat. Red is the primary damage dealer who can shoot from his rifle, use light & heavy attacks and unleash a big-time banish stab that builds up during battle. Nothing too complicated. He can be a bit of fun to play as, but he doesn’t evolve anywhere near as much as Antea, outside of his standard 4-hit combos and rifle shots. Switching between them on the fly—that’s where it gets good.

In regards to Antea, she unlocks several unique powers throughout the game that can quickly swing the proverbial tide. To summon her into the fray, Red needs to keep on the offensive and raise her character gauge, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be full. Any action she uses in combat will lower said gauge though, as will any damage taken. So she’s meant to be more a temporary power-up; being able to devastate a group of enemies by restricting their movement, leaping over from several metres for a strong ghost punch, or sending foes and objects packing with a literal spirit bomb. Goku would be proud.

That being said, while the combat system of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is entertaining, its limited enemy variety does start to hamper the experience over time. Major boss encounters are spread a little too thin and the minor ones are pretty much just bigger, regular enemies with only a slightly more imposing palette swap. Thankfully, the challenge has a nice upward curve to it, with five interchangeable difficulties to choose from the start. Since shadows can’t die twice though (at least, not in this game) Red is the only character you have to worry about keeping alive. Players won’t require hyper-twitch level reflexes to survive either. They just need to watch out for long-ranged enemies, any spirits trying to inhabit a stronger corpse or those that are protecting other spirits from harm. Nothing too major.

Valuable Side Content

What does offer a bigger challenge are the many ritual sites hidden across the land. Once activated, players will have to take on some rough and tough elite enemies or hordes of ghosts that make the action a lot more fast and furious. But to even the playing field, the game will display a message detailing which gameplay elements are buffed or which situations will yield more damage. This is a very cool setup that not only encourages the use of different attacks, but this system also adds onto Red and Antea’s passive equipment buffs as well. This means that if you take the rifle weak spot perk, for example, these two bonuses can stack onto each other and absolutely terrorise an enemy’s HP bar. 

Once you emerge victorious, Red and Antea will receive a +1 or +3 boost to all of their attribute points, depending on the type of enemy encounter. So taking the time to explore and seek out these optional fights is more than worth the investment. To supplement this, there are heaps of hidden collectables found around the lush environments of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden that will enhance your HP, spirit points and equipment. The latter can even be upgraded all the way to level VII, if you’re happy with its distinct perks. Red and Antea also share five skill tree sets that can help tailor the game to a specific fighting style. Interestingly enough, they sometimes apply various buffs to one specific area that compromise in another, encouraging a trial-and-error mindset to see what sticks or what doesn’t. It’s up to you.

When it comes to the music, the soundtrack’s mostly dark and sustained strings do an adequate job of maintaining that sombre ambience I mentioned earlier. Albeit, some more variation in tone and timbre would’ve helped to spice things up a bit. It all just gets a little too dreary after a while and the melodies aren’t particularly memorable to begin with. I honestly cannot remember a single tune, to be frank. One thing that was very consistent though was the performance on my PC. The frame rate often sat around 65 FPS with NVIDIA DLSS on Quality, and there were no obvious dips or hiccups even during the more mob-based encounters of the game. Besides a couple of funny glitches here and there, it only took a few seconds to load a save or fast-travel between the many campfires of New Eden. Pretty solid for a next-gen-only title, where an alarming amount of them are broken, buggy and poorly optimised (or some combination of the three) at launch. 

Decision

On the whole, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is certainly worth checking out. While the combat does take some time to fully come into its own, once it gets rolling, this open-world action RPG is surprisingly hard to put down. The real-time character swapping and battle modifiers promote clever, strategic offence and also encourage players to soak in and learn the gameplay mechanics as much as possible. There’s also a wealth of explorable areas to uncover, with handy collectable items and environmental puzzles that will constantly keep players on the lookout. Even though the investigation elements and stories that don’t involve Red and Antea can be a little too lore-dumpy, this game’s combat and sense of discovery more than make up for its shortcomings.

By Anthony Culinas – Reviewed on PC

Great

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden has turned out to be another strong IP for developers, Don’t Nod. The game features unique, real-time character-swapping to access different techniques and a solemn story that works best when it’s focused on the protagonists, Red and Antea. While the enemy variety is lacking and the investigation elements can be a tad tiresome, this 25-hour action RPG should absolutely be on your radar.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Focus Entertainment. The Beta Network uses affiliate partnerships, however, this does not influence reviews or any other content published. The Beta Network may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links that are on the website.