‘Geist,’ a recently released GameCube first-person shooter, had a lot of promise.

After all, few games’ premise revolves around the player controlling a ghost who can possess humans, animals and objects and to solve puzzles and navigate levels.

But after working for longer than two years, developer n-Space’s main concept is not fully realized.

While possessing a steam valve and causing it to burst and similar tricks are fun, the implementation is limited. The player can only possess certain objects, not anything in sight.

Living creatures cannot be taken over until frightened by inanimate objects doing strange things nearby.

It’s understandable that the game designers wanted to control the flow of their game, but it might be more fun taking over anyone instead of bothering with scaring a host first.

‘Geist’ has fairly nice visuals models generally look sharp but are low on polygons, and textures vary from beautiful to somewhat-low quality.

There is voice acting in the game, but mostly in cinematics alone. Short speech bytes accompany a lot of text when the player ‘talks’ to an in-game character.

In short, ‘Geist’ is fun and engaging, but not the stand-out game it should have been.

Give it a rent, then decide if it’s worth waiting for a price drop before buying $50 is probably asking a little too much.