Ghostbusters: The Video Game Review [PS3, X360]

Posted July 8, 2009 by DMoore in Featured, Featured Home, Game Blog, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360.

Reviewed on the PlayStation 3

Ah, nostalgia is a great thing, harking you back to memories of happier times, mostly when you were a kid and watched really bad sci fi or game shows and decided they were the best thing ever. Nostalgia, if your mind set is right, is the greatest thing in the world, which is great news because you will need a lot of it if you’re going to play GhostBusters: The Video Game.

Set in 1991, the game is a direct sequel to Ghostbusters 2 and sees the boys making a decent living as the city of New York has taken out a large insurance policy to allow them to keep going with their activities and fight the evil spirits that spread across town.

The talent, in terms of cast, for the game is impressive with all of the original Ghostbusters, besides Rick Moranis, returning along with Annie Potts who plays long suffering secretary Janine and that old enemy of the human kind, Walter Peck, played by William Atherton. Your character, however, is a new recruit to the ‘busters, and is a mute individual who gets to use all the new proton pack abilities Egon and Ray come up with.

The game was written by original movie writers Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and as such has all the hallmarks of that authentic Ghostbusters feel. The problem is that while the script is quite funny in places, the voice acting at times simply doesn’t do it justice, and can leave some jokes feeling particularly flat. Bill Murray in particular can feel off at times, and his trademark sarcastic wit as Pete Venkman just feels, to me at least, like it really needs him to be on screen to make it work.

As for the rest of the cast, they all do a great job, and developers Terminal Reality knew that the game just wouldn’t work without their input. The sound of the game is fantastic in general; when using the standard proton pack weapon you get all the same noises that the movie showed, which is what you really want. They even managed to get old favourites Slimer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow man in there too, which makes for a great few opening levels.

Where the game differs from the movie, apart from being made 25 years later, is with the abilities available to the Ghostbusters. As the ‘Experimental Equipment Technician’ it is your job to test the new powers of the proton pack, such as the shotgun like shockblast or the grenade like ability of the standard pack called a Boson dart. There are four modes in total for the pack, each useful in its own instance, though one is only really useful during the level you receive it. The slime tether, especially, is great to use to trap ghosts. You can also use the PKE meter and goggles to search for hidden spooks and scan them into Tobans Spirit Guide, building up a database of nasties that includes their weaknesses.

The standard proton pack weapon has that signature ghost busting ability of capturing ghosts in the stream so you can wrangle them down into a trap. You do this by hitting the ghost enough times so that its health drops down and the beam switches automatically to capture mode. If you’re using one of the other pack types you have to switch back to the proton stream, but since they are all mapped to the D-Pad it is not difficult.

Once you have the ghost in the capture stream, pressing the square button will drop a trap and you will have to wrangle the ghost to the stream of light emitted by the trap. As you hold the ghost, a meter builds up allowing you to slam the ghost into the ground or a wall and slow them down. After a few upgrades, slamming them straight into the trap means they are captured automatically in a fast and neat fashion.

The upgrades available are standard equipment upgrades, such as a more powerful shockblast or faster trap times, but they don’t allow for much customization, and they can all be gained by the end of the game, which isn’t very long at all.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game can be completed in around 6 to 8 hours, depending on if you spend time searching for collectibles using the PKE meter, but that is not a necessarily bad thing as a long adventure would have seen the combat become much more repetitious than it currently is — a short adventure is preferred to an artificially extended one.

Any extension in length comes from two places: 1) finding the previously mentioned collectibles and 2) the multiplayer, though unfortunately not many people are playing online. The online games I did play were very laggy, which is unfortunate as the online modes are very interesting, with no deathmatch option. Instead you can play through levels from the campaign cooperatively, play survival, which is this game’s take on the horde mode from Gears of War, or the competitive modes, which see players trying to trap as many ghosts as possible within a time limit, and others such as protection where you have to destroy artifacts to stop spawning ghosts.

The game looks great, the character models animate well and look like the Ghostbusters of 1991 should look, but much of the comedy from the films came from more of a visual nature, which is simply too hard to replicate in a game, making it all feel a little off at times. The ghosts themselves animate well too, and blasting them is as much fun as it should be, as is trapping. There are very little frame rate hitches that I saw as well, only bogging down for a tiny bit when lots of ghosts fill the room and proton streams and traps are flying.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game will appeal to fans of the film no mater what, as it does have the right feel, despite being off at times. The story is good and has some decent gags, and the wise choice of not making the player one of the original four means the banter between them continues through out. The multiplayer could have been much better, but its unique take on game modes and the way the developers have thought about what they doing with it makes it worth while, assuming you can get into a lag free match. A great game for fans then, but a unique take on the shooter for everyone else.

Tagged as atari, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters: The Videogame, Sony, Terminal Reality