Review
BANISH IT
I love games that force you to make difficult choices but not when you have to make your own fun
Read on to find out why the choices don't matter
WE stole hundreds of handbags when we played Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden.
You gather leather and linen for doing so, but there isn’t much use for it in the game.
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We didn’t steal handbags for the resources they left behind but for the thrill of it. We made our own fun.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is an action RPG developed by Don’t Nod, known for games like Life is Strange.
And just like Life is Strange, Banishers offers you a number of choices, but rather than focusing on these we decided to steal bags.
Protagonist Antea Duarte dies very early on, and one of your first decisions determines whether she can come back to life or not.
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You have the choice to murder everyone in the town and let her go, or bring her back through the slaughter of innocents.
The town of New Eden is plagued with famine and disease, and while the people seem fine, it is only natural to put them out of their suffering.
Both the big and the small decisions have consequences, but when you don’t connect with the characters, you don’t mind if you slay them in droves.
While this decision seems so heavy right at the start, towards the end, you can go back and erase everything just like Life is Strange did.
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But that was one of the weakest parts of the story then, as nothing you had done up to that point really mattered.
There is plenty to like about Banishers, from the visuals to the mythos of this new world, but it just isn’t deep enough.
It has too much of one thing and not another. There’s too much dialogue with too little substance, too much combat with too little depth, too much exploration with too little payoff.
When it comes to the combat, the mix between playing as Red and the ghost of Antea feels clunky.
It was a cumbersome, frustrating process, with our heroes switching places on a whim in battle to make the most of their unique skill sets.
It sounds good on paper, but in practice, the execution simply wasn’t satisfying.
When it comes to the choices that Banishers gave us, we made the choice to make our own fun by stealing from the dead.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is fine, but in a year with so many excellent games, it’s probably not worth your time.
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Written by Georgina Young on behalf of .
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