Ghost In The Shell First Assault: The First 7 Levels

I’ve never so much as seen a clip of the Ghost in the Shell anime, although my anime obsessed friends say it’s pretty good. Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex First Assault Online – which is clearly running for the “Longest MMO Title Ever” award—wasn’t even on my radar until a couple of weeks ago.

The trailer for this game made me instantly hyped for its release into Early Access on December 14th. (Is “Radioactive” the official gamer’s anthem yet?) I thought it was going to be free, but $4.99 is hardly a high price to pay in today’s world of $100 Founder’s Packs.

However, just before I bought the game and dove in head first, I came across the Nexon representative choosing to explain the game during a match to the mmos.horseracingexpert.net squad trying to tell people who they were through the game’s chat system.

Although, what was most interesting was that the game played nothing like how it’d been d. To be fair, Nexon didn’t really misrepresent the game. Aside from people not being dumb enough to run out in the open in packs without shooting someone right in front of them, everything you see in the trailer is in the current Early Access beta (alpha?). The game just felt much different. Slower and less fluid than the trailer initially led me to believe.

I was instantly skeptical, but impulsively bought my way into the game anyway. According to Steam I’ve played a little over 5 hours, reached level 7, unlocked 4 operatives, played each game mode at least 30 times and on each map 15 times. I feel pretty confident relaying a visage of what Ghost in the Shell has to offer.

(As to my FPS experience: I’ve played at the pro level of Call of Duty—granted this was back during the original Modern Warfare—have 300+ hours in CS:GO at MGE rank, and have played just about every FPS and MMOFPS under the sun at one point in time or another over the last 15 years. Does that qualify me to speak on the subject with authority? Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. But you have my credentials nonetheless.)

Shot Accuracy, Spray and Sprinting

DO NOT BUY INTO THIS BETA YET!

Whoops. Did I blow my load too early? Sorry, I couldn’t hold back the sheer aggravation this game has put me through for seven painstaking levels.

The shot accuracy is so random that I still don’t have a clue how it works after 5 hours, and no one else in the dozens of chat lobbies I’ve asked has said otherwise. If you do happen to jump in the game, put a few clips into the wall and you’ll see what I mean. It certainly doesn’t follow CS:GO spray pattern logic, but it doesn’t follow CoD’s “always on point” logic either. It’s a weird mixture of both that’ll leave many players quite frustrated and many spectators wondering how someone got a headshot while aiming to the right of an opponent’s knee.

However, the biggest issue I ran into was movement. While you can sprint forever, the sprinting isn’t much faster than normal movement. It feels like you’re an overweight teenager on his third mile in a 5k marathon, who’s making running motions but not moving any faster than usual. The same applies to crouching too, your overall movement speed doesn’t slow enough to matter. Seeing as how crouching diminishes your weapon’s overall spread—as it does in most FPS games—crouch walking is currently a viable strategy for cautious players or those who generally care about their KDR (kill-death ratio).

The best strategy I’ve found is to pre-fire and spray. The first few bullets occasionally don’t seem to count, as if your gun has to rev up a bit before it begins firing actual projectiles. However, once the gun starts going it’s quite accurate. Control the recoil and it’ll almost always shoot in a straight line, nabbing you a kill or two.

Bullets do require a bit of flight time though. If you aim directly at a moving target you’re sure to miss. You have to lead the shot a bit to get a hit. You might be thinking, “Well duh! That’s how bullets work dumbass!” But I assure you it’s a bit longer than feels quite right.

The TLDR version is don’t tap shoot, despite the game feeling attuned to a tap shooter’s playstyle.

Thrown Together Game Modes

We’re not going to talk about team deathmatch because there’s nothing to talk about. Each team plays to 100 kills and that’s it, but I do have plenty of things to say about the other two game modes: Terminal Conquest and Demolition.

Demolition is essentially Search and Destroy except everyone on the attacking team has the bomb. It’s a fine enough game mode, and perfect for people who want to play something without respawns, but I find that everyone having the bomb takes away from the strategy that makes Search and Destroy fun. The idea is great for filthy casuals, but it imbalances the game mode in the attacking team’s favor and gives whichever team starts off as the attackers a clear advantage.

Terminal Conquest reminds me of a game mode I know I’ve seen in another game before but can’t quite which. You essentially have King of the Hill style terminal points, and each team works to either capture enough points in a row to reach their opponent’s base or be the first to capture 5 points. As time progresses and a terminal isn’t taken for an unusually long amount of time, the rate at which it’s captured increases in an attempt to break the stalemate.

Whenever a team captures a terminal, they get a Think-Tank—a spider mech that helps them push and capture the next terminal. The enemy team can try to hack the mech in order to shut it down and do more damage, but anyone trying to hack it can be seen through walls and is usually hunted down quite easily.

I have two major issues with Terminal Conquest:

1. The mech functions as a win-more device. The team that wins a point has a much easier time winning the next, which makes snowballing a very real issue and concern.
2. Spawn camping is stupid easy and effective. In the other two game modes the spawn either changes depending on players’ location or there is no respawn to worry about, but in Terminal Conquest the spawn points are fixed depending on where the terminal is located. It’s not uncommon to see people run past the terminal in an attempt to get behind the opposing team’s spawn for easy kills.

Terminal Conquest is fundamentally broken to the point where I don’t bother playing it. Luckily I haven’t had a problem finding full lobbies in the other game modes, so I wasn’t forced to play Terminal Conquest more than I felt necessary to properly assess the game mode—which was about 25 matches.

Operative Skills

Ghost in the Shell Online’s claim to fame, or at least individualism, is its operative skills. The game has a variety of operatives available to play as, which I’m assuming are characters from the show, each of whom has their own special skill that becomes available during each game as you kill people and complete objectives. These special skills range from invisibility to mobile turrets to missiles that fire from inside your arm.

Each skill has two tiers. If you wait to accumulate enough points to use the tier 2 version of your skill you’re awarded with either two missiles instead of one or by being able to share your skill with your teammates.

The game is at its best when someone cloaks themselves and a few of their teammates before they push into a demolition site or take a terminal point. This happens surprisingly more often in public matches than you may think because players don’t have to intentionally share their skills. Just being near a player utilizing a tier 2 skill is enough for you to be able to take advantage of it.
Unfortunately not all skills are created equal, but if I started talking about the game’s imbalanced features and functions then we’d be here all day. It’s Early Access. Of course some things, like skills, are imbalanced. Expecting anything else would be ludicrous.

Pointless Sockets

After each game you have the chance to get experience or currency reward boosts for the game you just played in addition to sockets, which serve to give operatives small boosts to aspects like reload speed and skill charge. The problem with these sockets is that they don’t last longer than a couple of games and you don’t get them often enough to keep your operative reasonably socketed 5% of the time.

I don’t understand why all the postgame rewards aren’t sockets. Who cares about 10% more XP when they could get 10 – 20% faster reload speed? The system is in desperate need of improvement, otherwise it should just be trashed.

Guns, Operatives, Currencies, and Skins

You unlock gun attachments as you use the corresponding weapon while new primary weapons are unlocked by spending accumulated TP, which generates slowly at the end of each match. After 5 hours of play I’m almost close to unlocking my first additional primary weapon, which seems pretty reasonable.

You can forgo all that and just use GP—the in-game currency you get after each game and every time your levels up—to instantly unlock whatever you want, but they cost so much that even people who buy the Specialist Early Access package won’t be able to unlock a new weapon without a few 50k GP level-up rewards. Although who knows how pointless, or potentially pay-to-win, it’ll gets once Nexon introduces its currency.

Right now there aren’t many guns to choose from and even less secondary weapons or grenade types. People who pay a bit more for Early Access will get a new skin for the three main weapons, but otherwise there are no skins available in the game right now. Hopefully that’s how they try to monetize the game in the future instead of going pay-to-win.

The operatives are another story. When you start the game you get to pick one operative to unlock and play as, which can really blow if you’re like me and you pick an operative with a weak skill. You get two free additional operatives as your levels-up, one at levels three and five respectively, which happens relatively quickly. The rest of the operatives require you to purchase a 250k GP license each.

Three out of seven operatives isn’t bad after the first few hours of the game, and you could potentially get another at level five if you don’t spend any of your GP. I personally don’t have a problem with this as long as they keep the ratio under control for new players and don’t introduce operatives that are only available via currency.

Someone Call an Exterminator

The game is extremely buggy, which wouldn’t be notable if it weren’t for some of the types of bugs I’ve experienced on a regular basis. There are two that are simultaneously laughable and frustrating depending on how serious you take the game:
Staying alive after death, which isn’t noticeable at all until the round ends and you realize that you randomly died sometime during the round. (It’s worth playing Demolition to experience this bug for yourself.)

Pulsating, frozen sentry drone models that stay in place but will still scare the shit out of you at first and cause you to waste a few bullets (or wonder why your sentry drone isn’t doing anything). The same thing occasionally happens to Think-Tanks.

Ultimately, There’s Nothing New Here

Unless you’re a massive Ghost in the Shell fan, there’s nothing here that you can’t get better elsewhere. I don’t understand why the same company that already has Dirty Bomb in its stable of MMOs has decided to pick this game up too, aside from the name recognition—which is probably why.

The best advice I can leave you with is to give it time. The game has a bit of potential to be a fun occasional free-to-play FPS alternative, but right now there’s not enough to warrant your attention and it’s not like Nexon needs your $5 to fund the game.