Ghost Squad

Ghost Squad Impressions

The light gun shooter genre hasn't been tremendously popular of late in the home console market, with the rise of console first-person shooter games helping to reduce the flow of peripheral-based shooter games to a mere trickle. But when the very first videos of the Wii Remote arrived, many gamers thought it would make a perfect controller for a shooter game. Although Red Steel, the first real attempt at making a shooter game on the Wii, turned out poorly, Sega's going back to the well with Ghost Squad, a port of its arcade hit from 2005.

In Ghost Squad, you take on the role of an elite soldier fighting terrorism all around the globe. Not to be confused with Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon games, the Ghost here stands for Global Humanitarian Operation and Special Tactics Squad. Although it sounds like a mighty highfalutin title for your squad, the gameplay in Ghost Squad is actually quite reminiscent of other arcade shooters, such as Virtua Cop. Enemies pop up in front of you, and you shoot them. It's not that difficult of a concept to grasp!

The catch here, of course, is that you're going to be pointing your Wii Remote at the screen to do the shooting. From what we've seen, the aiming and shooting seem to work quite well for Ghost Squad, even if the Wii Remote is something of a downgrade in size from the oversized submachine guns in the arcade version of Ghost Squad. To help you tell where you're aiming, a targeting reticle will appear on the screen to guide your aim, just like in Red Steel.

The Wii Remote is also used in a variety of other ways. For instance, there are occasionally bombs that you'll have to defuse, and you'll need to select wires to snip in a certain order. Other portions of the game will feature quick timing events that will force you to move the Wii Remote to perform certain other actions, such as deflecting the knife blows of enemies that get too close to you.

The level that we were shown took place in a Camp David-esque set of rustic buildings where terrorists were holding the president of the US, as well as other world leaders. Rather than take a subtle route, the Ghost Squad simply blew open a door and proceeded to mow down the terrorists, traveling both into and outside of the buildings. The game offers up to 25 different weapons to use, and a few of them were on display, including the normal submachine gun and a sniper rifle. If you're really looking for a challenge, you can even downgrade yourself to a normal pistol and attempt to complete the game with it.

Up to four players can compete at the same time in Ghost Squad; each will get his own uniquely colored targeting reticle to help him aim. In addition, you'll periodically receive orders from your commander, who will issue helpful commands, such as "The enemies are still around! Defeat them!"

Ghost Squad should be hitting the Wii this fall, so keep an eye on GameSpot for more details on the game in the coming months.

Gamespot