Some people may argue that to be partly true. The Ghost Survivors relate to a series of lore-based scenarios that briefly tell the individual tales of peril of a group of people in desperate situations they need to escape from within Raccoon City.
However, what follows is a quartet of repetitive gauntlet-esque levels which recycle many elements of the main game into a collection of speedrun exercises designed to see how quickly you can reach the end location and navigate the various obstacles in your path along the way.
The concept is simply to get from point A to point B with a very limited inventory whilst evading hordes of zombies on your way to the escape point. It's exactly the same as the 4th Survivor scenario from the main game, replicated with a cast of new characters and a few gameplay tweaks to the existing formula.
You have a couple of options to assist your route along the way. Certain enemies will carry backpacks which drop loot to stock up your inventory and you'll also pass by item dispensers. These give you 3 options for improving your inventory, but the catch is that you can only choose 1 of these items to carry forward with you. Do you take the new weapon or the ammunition for the one you already have? It adds a layer of strategic thinking to the game.
Truthfully, I wasn't big on this piece of DLC. The escape routes see you track back through the exact same areas in the main game, and whilst you could argue this makes sense for the reasons of continuity, it still feels a bit stale. It's important to remember that this is a game that required 5/6 playthroughs for the Platinum trophy. The last thing I wanted to see again was recycled scenery. Weapons and items are exactly the same, as are the majority of the enemies you'll encounter. There are a couple of new enemies with new traits, but this just seems like a token gesture to the necessity of making the content seem fresh. I would have preferred some proper fleshed out story-driven content personally.
The package adds just 2 trophies. Across the 4 scenarios, there are 10 new Mr. Raccoon figurines to find and shoot, which grants one of these trophies. The other focuses on beating all of the content, and whilst a simple concept at heart, it's anything but if your intention is to earn both trophies;
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| Hell of a Sheriff - Complete the "No Way Out" scenario. (No training mode). |
The "Hell of a Sheriff" trophy, awarded for Completing the "No Way Out" scenario, requires you to beat every Ghost Survivor scenario within this package.
Initially, there are 3 scenarios available to play out. "No Time to Mourn" focuses on Robert Kendo. You encounter Robert part-way through the main story. He's the owner of the gun shop whose daughter has been bitten and turned. "Runaway" tells the brief story of Katherine Warren, another captured victim of Police Chief Irons desperate to escape his makeshift lab-den. Finally, "Forgotten Soldier" focuses on a soldier in a race against time after a botched virus retrieval mission with the underground lab due to self-destruct.
Each scenario has difficulty ratings attached to them, but I didn't personally find this to be any sort of clear guidance on actual difficulty. I tackled them all in the order above, and the learning curve for each one requires a fresh reset every time. A different route with different hazards and different inventory options. You can't really apply the same template for success to each run, and this adaptability is important to passing them all.
These scenarios aren't intended to be beaten first time. The experimental trial and error nature is exactly what this game mode is all about. It's memorisation of the route ahead of you and learning, mostly the hard way, about what you'll need to do differently next time in order to successfully tackle certain areas and get by without dying - Chaining this all together for the perfect run. You may get lucky on the odd occasion, but getting from point A to B all the way in one go will require mastery of the level and understanding the optimal route.
This includes knowing which items to pick from the dispenser options, which areas you can viably run past enemies to preserve resources/ammo and the danger areas where you're most likely to die and may need to save certain parts of your inventory for.
Your completion time is recorded for each of these scenarios, though this isn't important for the requirements of the trophy, though speedrunners will love the fact there is a global leaderboard tied to this game mode. For me, I was happy to just beat them and move one. Once I'd played through the scenarios a handful of times, and learnt the optimal routes, I was able to comfortably get through them. I liked the idea of learning through failure, and that sort of thing will always count as progress to me.
The only main frustration is that the consistency of enemy behaviour is a big issue every now and again. Sometimes you'll run through a densely populated area of the map and get grabbed multiple times, which will pretty much end your run. Another time, you'll get past exactly how you should have done. This became increasingly annoying when I had to replay the scenarios for the purpose of cleaning up the missing Mr. Raccoons I didn't find first time round.
However, this doesn't unlock the trophy in question. Upon completing all 3 scenarios with any time posted, you'll unlock the final scenario. "No Way Out" sees you stuck in the gas station as Daniel Cortini - The Sherriff from the very beginning of the game.
This follows a much different format to the first 3 scenarios. You're stuck in a very confined space and have to kill 100 zombies to beat the scenario. They can enter the gas station from 3 different doors and come at you in waves that you'll need to manage with a set inventory of items. Backpack zombies still exist to drop additional weaponry/items and you just have to outlast the 100 zombies to clear the scenario.
Again, strategy plays a big part in this. The zombies come at you from the easiest to toughest forms, so difficulty scales according to your kill total. It's important to preserve the better weaponry for as long as possible because the limited amount of manoeuvrable space is the real enemy here. Learning which zombies are due to spawn in and when to use certain weapons is crucial to success. You don't want to waste the Spark Gun ammo on easier to kill enemies and the Anti-Tank Launcher should only be used when in a last ditch attempt to save your life.
In my initial runs, I could reach the 40-50 mark for kills and gradually improved on this with more practice. I noticed the one door remains shut for a fair amount of time and played a reasonable portion of the level with my back to it, using the sales counter as a barrier between me and the zombies to pick them off knowing I wouldn't have to watch out for what was behind me until much later on.
The poison zombies are a big threat here because the confined surroundings don't give you much space to avoid their poisonous explosions when you kill them. You do get 3 blue herbs though, which will certainly come in use, but aside the tendency to have to deal with overwhelming numbers at times, this is the biggest threat to a run. As mentioned, the Anti-Tank gun you find towards the end is clutch in these circumstances.
That is the last step towards the trophy though, and I reckon I put around 10-12 hours into this across all 4 scenarios. The mode did start to wear thin on me pretty quickly, and I was only really driven forward by the fact I could see progress within the failure that I knew was edging me closer to the goal. Very similar in the same way I experienced in my recent run of Super Meat Boy, just nowhere near as fun. I liked the silly headwear accessories you can unlock and wear though.
