The first Ghostbusters movie came out in 1984 and penetrated the pop culture of the world. Nearly everyone in the U.S. knows of and most likely has seen this movie. The sequel came out two decades ago in 1989. It spawned off a cartoon series and a couple minor games. But it wasn’t until a couple years ago when a leaked tech demo inspired the imagination of gamers worldwide about the potential of a Ghostbusters game on the current generation machines. The tech demo was from a competition between developers to win the lucrative license to build the game and it actually didn’t win. The people over at Terminal Reality must’ve showed them the goods and they got the contract to build the game. Terminal Reality was most notable for the BloodRayne series but has enjoyed a long history of making games. Unfortunately they haven’t really had much more success than that franchise. To help aid them in development, they brought on developer Threewave to build the multiplayer. These guys have had their hands in making the multiplayer for a lot of big games from the recent Army of Two all the way back to Jedi Academy and Doom III capture the flag. These guys obviously know multiplayer. Plus to aid these developers in making the best game possible, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Remis (Ray and Egon respectively) are back to pen the story. So will this title match the greatness of the movie or will we get slimmed?

Ghostbusters is a third-person action game where you fill the shoes of the nameless new recruit. You exist as a silent observer to the story. Just think of this as Ghostbusters 3 because that’s how it is presented. It’s written by the same people who wrote the movies, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Remis. Peter, Ray, Egon, and Winston are all back and there are some mysterious things going on at the Gozer exhibit at the museum. The story starts off slow but eventually gets off the ground and becomes decent. It’s predictable and generic but it’s definitely Ghostbusters. There are several references to the previous movies, both big and small. Therefore your enjoyment of the story will hinge on how big of a fan you are because a lot of things can fly right over your head and if you don’t get most of those, the humor will fall on deaf ears and the base story is only average.

As stated above, Ghostbusters is a third-person action game and throughout you’ll be fighting two distinct enemy types. First up you have is the ghosts which are self-explanatory but then some of the more powerful ones will spawn off minions which act like any other enemy in games. Ghosts need to be tackled just like they do in the movies. Whip out your proton pack and blast them until they get weak enough to throw out the trap and capture them. There is a decent learning curve associated with this but before long you’ll be capturing ghosts like nothing. If you miss with your stream, expect to start causing some serious damage to your surroundings which is really cool. If you are a fan of that, it keeps track of how much money you cost the city by destroying the locales. In addition to the proton pack you also get 3 other weapons and each has a secondary function. They all fit into various generic weapon slots except for the slim tether but even that isn’t a new idea. The slim tether will help you complete puzzles as well as lock down some ghosts for trapping. By trapping ghosts and killing minions you also get money and this money can be put forward to upgrading your weapons but they never significantly change. When you’re not taking down ghosts, you’re using your PKE meter which allows you to detect ghosts and their residual readings. Plus scanning the ghosts will show their weaknesses off so you know which weapon is best for each situation.

This sounds all good and it really is at some points but there are a lot of issues. There are points where all the actions stop and you’re supposed to investigate the world with your PKE meter. But the entire atmosphere they’ve built up vanishes in an instant when you can’t interact with the characters. They just stand there nearly still and perfectly silent waiting for you to trigger an invisible trigger. Your team mates are pretty dumb and will even run past you when you’re down and need to be revived. And the biggest issue is that the game doesn’t teach you how to play the game very well. When you get knocked down, chances are you won’t understand why it happened other than a ghost hit you. The only viable strategy I found was to run around like a chicken with its head cut off to avoid ghosts hitting you. The bosses are boring and require no skill to kill, just keep firing until they’re dead. For how focused the game is on the PKE meter, it’s a huge oversight that you can’t scan the final boss. Overall this just adds up to a lack of polish. It can still be fun sometimes, especially during some small solo parts, but at other times it can feel like a chore. Mostly though, it’ll feel merely okay with just enough to keep you going.

Once you’re done with the single player, it’s time to take it online. Before you start playing though, you can choose your player model and weapon specialization, which is cool. But unless you have an elite team, it’s pointless to pick someone other than the trusty proton gun since it’s the only one that can capture ghosts. There six different modes to dive into with three other friends. The first is Survival and the best mode. It is similar to horde mode on Gears of War 2 where you and your teammates hold of successively harder waves of ghosts and minions. Containment and Slim Dunk are the cooperative and competitive versions of each other respectively. The goal is to capture as many ghosts as you can and is pretty fun, especially when you steal them from your friends. Protection and Thief are minor variations of each other. Both cooperative, in the former you’re protecting PKE meters from ghosts and in Thief you’re preventing ghosts from stealing relics. Next you’ll have Destruction where you run around destroying relics that spawn ghosts and minions. And finally there is a mode called campaign. I didn’t list this with the other modes because this is just three of them randomly slapped together. The twist is that your cooperative team sticks together and eventually earns upgraded weapons similar to single player. You can play these modes ranked or unranked. Rank is determined by money but unfortunately you can’t buy anything with it. Another thing to keep you playing is the most wanted ghosts which will randomly spawn during games that you’ll have to capture. Unfortunately some of the modes split up the okay gameplay of the single player which can make some of them get old really quick. This also makes the campaign mode hit or miss because if you get caught in one of the boring game modes it’ll distract from what’s fun about the game. Overall even how comprehensive the multiplayer seems, it’s going to get old quick and there is only a couple modes worth your time.

The graphics are quite well done in most cases. The player models look great and look exactly how the actors looked back when the movies came out. There is a great slimmed effect that stays on characters. The enemy design is pretty cool for this kind of story. You’ll have flying books and attacking candles, which you may expect in a fantasy game but have definitely not taken a gun to them before. It’s subtle but there is some great physics running underneath so when you dock a minion, they’ll fly back hitting everything in the way really realistically. The proton pack looks great and is highly detailed. The stream is even better because everything it touches gets destroyed. Unfortunately there is a nasty side to this though, the animations. The transitions from cut scenes to gameplay can be rough. When you or a teammate is downed, they have absolutely no animation. During the awkward phases in the single player where you have to investigate, your teammates are practically still which just zaps the atmosphere from the game. A lot of it’s great but when you start missing crucial parts of the jigsaw, the entire look suffers. 

All of the original actors are back, even Janine the secretary of the Ghostbuster’s HQ and it immediately feels like Ghostbusters. The game is littered with witty banter and neat references to the previous movies that if you get, will make you laugh and remember the good old days. Unfortunately they do repeat the same things over and over a lot, especially in combat. Causing massive destruction with the proton pack sounds devilishly good but the other guns aren’t as great. The music is great, very similar to the orchestrated stuff from the movies but some themes do become a little too repetitive, like the menu music. And of course, the Ghostbusters theme song is included but I was disappointed I didn’t get to hear the full thing, even during the credits.

Third-person action games are everywhere today and have evolved into well-oiled machines this generation. The issue with Ghostbusters is that it feels very archaic. Frequently the game takes control of the camera to show you things which are commonly just in-game these days. The transitions between cut scenes and game play can be a little disorienting because they don’t line up very well. Several times during the game, everyone will essentially freeze and wait for you to stumble upon a scripted event. It really kills the atmosphere because they are so still and lifeless. When doing things as simple as opening a door feels rough. Adding to this feeling is the poor animations. When someone is waiting to be revived, there is no animation, at all, when they are on the ground. When you open a door, your character slides back to get into the proper animation position before you kick it open. This is all contrasted by overall pretty good graphics despite the poor animations. The models are very accurate to the actors. There are some really nice, though subtle, physics in the game as you kill enemies. And the entire world has some destructibility which gives it the chaotic edge that you’d think using the proton pack would have. The story is penned by the original writers which is really neat but unless you’re a huge fan of the movies, a lot of the jokes and references will fly over your head. If you’re a diehard fan, there is no question you’ll want to buy this game but for everyone else, rent first.

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