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There’s nothing like eating gods for breakfast as the Ghostbusters return to save the world once again from the minions of evil. Developed by Terminal Reality, Ghostbusters the video game is, in the words of its co-creator Dan Aykroyd, “this is essentially the third movie” and it shows through the cinematic and interactions with the main characters.
For those of you who don’t know who or what the Ghostbusters are, Ghostbusters is a science-fiction comedy film made in 1984 about parapsychologists, doctors who study the paranormal, who decide to open up their own ghost hunting firm. Things start off slow for the Ghostbusters but an increase in paranormal activities rockets the Ghostbusters ahead in jobs. Two movies later, a few possessions, and the defeat of a Sumerian god, Ghostbusters became a hit in the late 80s and becoming a classic.
The Ghostbuster video game has its own sordid history. When the publisher Vivendi merged with Activision in 2008, Ghostbusters was one of the titles not confirmed for release through the new Activision Blizzard publisher. By the end of 2009, Atari announced it would be releasing the game in the United States in June 2009 for the 25th anniversary of the Ghostbusters franchise.
When I picked up this game for $30 on pc, I had low expectations. Multiplayer was not included, video games of movie franchises are not known for being good, and I wasn’t really a Ghostbuster fan having only seen the movies as a child once.
The game puts you in the shoes of a new recruit during the Thanksgiving weekend, two years after Ghostbusters 2. A psycho kinetic surge sweeps the city of New York and a resurgence in ghosts break out through the city. The Ghostbusters get to work on investigating the cause of the surge and the return of a familiar Sumerian god.
Throughout the game, your weapons are upgraded to include different function for different ghosts and uses. Each weapon has dual functions such as a massive missile like energy blast, a slimer, a freeze ray, , and even a homing machine gun like the one found in the movie, Fifth Element. The recruit himself is only known as the Rookie as the Ghostbusters don’t want to get attached to him in case one of the new weapons blow him up and this works well in the story of the game.
The game is more like an interactive movie and you are the spectator who helps drive along the story. The Rookie never speaks and the only sounds he makes are screams or grunts in the game as the real stars are the main Ghostbusters who explain the events in the game to you and how everything relates to the previous two movies. The amount of tie ins and how all the events in the previous movies were all part of one large master plan really did give me a sense that THIS is a movie. Although, towards the end of the game the story begins to lose steam and it just becomes a “the evil guy is there past all the mazes, go get him.”
For gameplay, at first the controls felt very laggy to me, especially the mouse movement. After tuning the sensitivity a bit and an hour, I got the mouse controls down. The camera controls are decent and good enough that you can move around to follow ghosts zooming up above you but it also took a while to adjust to.
Almost every furniture, decoration, and items laying about are able to be blasted apart or used by ghosts and sent careening throughout the room which really adds to the feel that you are the classic property destroying Ghostbusters of the films. However at times, there are so many interactions going on that my computer started slowing down at these scenes dipping below 15FPS until the effect wore off. One scene in particular early on in the game involving water flooding a hallway required me to lower the graphical settings for that section.
Scanning the Librarian Ghost
There are some frustrating mechanics in the game though such as the knockdown effect. You and your fellow Ghostbusters will be knocked around, a lot, by the ghosts and their weapons. The normal amount is 3 knockdowns within a short time and you’re incapacitated and must wait for your teammates to come by to revive you. There are points in the game where enemies can swarm you and quickly incapacitate you and your team at the same moment at which case you’ll have to reload from the checkpoint again. That would be alright with me if it were not for the long load times in the game. Each time a map is loaded, it took around 40 seconds at the loading screen as the game seems to load an entire level so each level has one loading screen but at the cost of longer time spent starting at a black screen saying “Loading.”
Reviving a fallen Teammate
Aiming and using the different modes of proton packs are easy to learn and using your PKE meter + goggles to scan ghosts before you fight tells you the weakness of each ghost and what weapon mode works the best against them. For each ghost you capture and scan you complete, you receive money that you can put towards buying upgrades for your proton pack to increase how long you can fire and the strength of each weapon. One upgrade I particularly like is the slam dunk upgrade which allows you to just slam a ghost into the trapper to capture the ghost immediately without having to wrangle it into the capture cone.
The energy meter of the ghost shows around the crosshairs
Each ghost has a little meter that shows up on your crosshair that shows the energy that they have. You must deplete the negative energy of these ghosts with your proton pack so that they are weak enough that you can use your trap and contain the ghosts. When the ghost is weak enough, your proton stream automatically turns into a capture stream that holds on to the ghost while your wrangle it in over your laid out trap. Using the right mouse button allows you to toss the ghost around in your stream to the walls, ceilings, or floor of the area to daze the ghost allowing you an easier time to draw them down into the trap.
Capturing a ghost
The graphics and sound do their job well within the game and the proton pack is extremely detailed as it should be. It tells you all you need to know in the game, your current weapon mode, heat lode on the proton wand, your health, and the PKE meter hanging from it even changes color to show hidden object nearby. Although the lips seem to lag during cinematic, the actors really bring out their enthusiasms for the voice acting although Bill Murray sounds a bit more deadpan than usual during his scenes.
The Stay Puft doesn’t look very happy
If you’ve watched the movies, you’ll understand things a whole lot better for the story in the game. If you’re looking for choices or ways to change the story, this game is not for you. It’s shooting and capturing on rails and you only have to activate key spots to advance the story along. The game is also quite short coming in at around 7 hours for me to complete and get all the hidden artifacts and scanning every new ghost in the game. Although the ending felt rushed, the timing felt right as I began to get tired of all the ghost capturing and the waves of ghosts being sent towards you near the end. It was a nice, enjoyable, and funny continuation of the Ghostbusters franchise and I would recommend it to all Ghostbusters fan and for everyone else, you will enjoy the game as long as you know about the key plots from the previous games.
