I finished Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden on the hardest difficulty. It took me around 50 hours, which included most, but not all, of the major side quests.

This game is made by Don’t Nod studios … primarily famous for their Life is Strange serious of games, and Vampyr. I haven’t actually played any of those, so I went into this game blind.

At its core, Banishers is an over the shoulder first person action game, but one that leans much more heavily into the narrative, and falls apart a bit on the combat. You play as Red, a Scotsman, and Antea, his Cuban girlfriend. Both are the titular Banishers … or ghost hunters, in other words.

When you get into the specifics, Banishers feels like an amalgamation of several specific games. God of War in environmental design and combat, the Witcher in terms of gathering materials and the rustic vibe given off by the early settler vibe, and the detective segments of the Batman Arkham series of games.

The game starts off strong, with surprisingly good voice acting, graphics, and a fairly engaging introduction to a town in dire need of saving. While I was somewhat confused that the game had no HDR support in this day and age, it’s honestly not a deal breaker.

As Banishers then expands into an open world that is connected but more as a series of large areas and corridors, it’s not too much of a spoiler to mention that Antea dies in the prologue and Red is left to continue the adventure with Antea still being very involved 50 / 50, but as a ghost. The core of the game then involves discovering and dealing with the massive curse that has settled upon the town of New Eden.

Along the way, you do specific “Haunting” missions that are fully scripted side quests and count towards the overarching decision mechanic of a “ascend” or “resurrect” choice for Antea. “Blame” the living person and you sacrifice them and count towards a resurrection. Deal with the ghost and you assist in ascending Antea’s ghost. This isn’t unlike the heavy handed “good” or “evil” RPG paths of many games in the past. When you get to the conclusion of a haunting sometimes the choice will be pretty obvious and other times, you’ll have to decide how you feel about how things went down. If I do have a complaint, it just feels the Hauntings are too linear, requiring no thinking and just discovering stuff the game guides you to in a linear path. But overall the writing in these quests is very good and playing them through can be considered its own reward in that way. As a series of ghost stories in a bleak environment, expect some real “downer” stories that lean into the evil men do.

I do however suggest spoiling things a bit for yourself and just looking up how many missions you need to swing your decisions one way or the other for a proper ending … there is no particular way you will know how much slack you have on doing things otherwise and it might feel like a big waste of time to get it wrong by the end of the game.

Side activities include occasional smallish fetch/kill quests and various combat challenge areas you can run across, called specter nests or void runs or some such. There are also cursed chests that can be opened for gear if you gather all the figurines in an area. I actually completed missed the quest to unlock these chests and had no idea what was going on … but it ended up being pretty meaningless.

Now as far as the actual gameplay goes, there are skill trees, currency to buy items with from stores, materials to gather and upgrade your equipment with, etc. You might be able to tell from my experience with the cursed chests that I didn’t feel these upgrades were particularly consequential, so while serviceable, the loot design did not appeal to me.

The combat itself is very God of War like, with light and heavy attacks, a dodge / roll button, a ranged attack in the form of a rifle, and a “banish” meter that can be built up to deal a burst of damage. The key extra mechanic here is that you also build up a spirit meter that can be used to switch to Antea in ghost form. Antea deals spirit damage, has different abilities, and doesn’t actually die … she just disappears temporarily until you build up more spirit meter as Red.

On the hardest difficulty, the combat cannot really be described as anything but a chore. Enemies are super spongy and follow patterns where you can only safely get in a couple of hits at a time because you yourself will die in one or two hits. Using Antea can be very important to avoid randomly dying in a long slog of a fight and having to redo the fight again. If there’s more than one enemy, you’ll spend time dodging both attacks and getting in even less damage. On top of this, the camera/lock on system is simply awful. It’s difficult to target the enemy you want to hit, and because enemies are all around you, the camera will often refuse to let you switch targets as needed, resulting in a great amount of frustration. Overall, combat is by far the weakest part of the Banishers and is unfortunate because it is the “game” part of the game.

I enjoyed the graphics in this game, but the game consists almost entirely of forest and caves. Thus the production values are high, but very limited in scope. Sound and voice acting however were great … definitely no complaints.

To conclude, Banishers is a game I feel is worth playing for the narrative and production values, but if you want to engage with the combat and game mechanics along the way, those parts are more frustrating and vapid than engaging, although not completely awful. So I would suggest playing on a lower difficulty, although I don’t know if my personal pride would let me do that! I am normally something of a completionist when it comes to games like this (Spider Man, God of War, Batman Arkham), but in this case I simply lost patience and probably stopped about 20% short due to the need to slog through the annoying combat.