Reviewer: Craig Reade
Quick Rating: Average
Rating: T (Teen)
Official Site

The ghost of Shandor attempts to summon Gozer, and the Ghostbusters have to stop him.

Platform: XBox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 2, Nintendo DS, PSP, PC (Windows)
Developer: Terminal Reality, Threewave Software, Red Fly Studio, Zen Studios
Publisher: Atari
Genre: Action/Adventure
# of Players: 1, Multiplayer online
U.S. Release Date: June 16th, 2009
MSRP: $59.99 ($39.99 Wii, $29.99 PSP, DS & PC, $19.99 PS2)

So what is not to like about this? A brand new Ghostbusters game, reuniting Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, and Ernie Hudson in their original roles (not to mention Annie Potts, Brian Doyle-Murray, and William Atherton), with writing guidance from Ghostbuster gurus Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis? This sounds like digital gold.

Of course, adding to the hype was this game’s long journey to publication, the famous decade-old feud between Harold Ramis and Bill Murray coming to an end, Activision‘s Blizzard merger almost killing it – the years it took for this game to become a reality was almost a movie unto itself.

After all the hype, all the anticipation, the game is finally released. And after I sit down to play it, I have to say that my reaction was a resounding “Meh.”

Don’t get me wrong – there is a lot of positives to this game. The nostalgia factor is through the roofs. Some might complain that the developers chose to cram every single possible reference to the films into this game, but I favor that kind of pandering. It’s a Ghostbusters game. I want to fight Stay Puft, chase down Slimer, and confront Eleanor Twitty. Yeah, some of these elements seemed forced into the story, but they are supposed to be there. The addition of the original film soundtrack and the original voices really added to the flavor. The songs set the mood, and the familiar voices help keep you engaged.

The trouble is, the game itself really is boring. The nostalgia factor is the only thing that keeps you motivated to play the game through to the end. The entire game really comes down to a pair of game mechanics – hitting ghosts with the streams long enough that you can trap them (and doing so), or soaking non-trappable enemies with slime blowers until they die. This you do over, and over, and over again. Of course, killing things over and over is the basis of all games, but a weak design amplified the repetitiveness.

In order to properly explain what was wrong with the game, I have to start by explaining how it worked. You are “Rookie,” an unnamed 5th Ghostbuster that is tasked with handling all of the prototype gear that Egan has developed. This includes your proton pack, which actually functions as four different weapons. The standard proton stream, the shock blast, a more efficient slime blower, and the meson collider. You have a PKE meter that is used to scan and log the different entities you encounter, and also can track your target and any bonus items you need to discover.

So far so good – but the health system is where the game starts to unravel. You don’t really have a health-meter per se. You get hit with enough attacks quick enough, and you are put out of action and need to be revived. As you take abuse, the only visible evidence is a bit of blurred vision that you experience until you recover. You are almost always working with at least one other Ghostbuster, however, and they can revive you. You can also revive them if they get incapacitated – revival means a complete restoration of health.

“Oh, that’s easy!” You must be thinking. And I don’t blame you.

Trouble is – there is no rhyme or reason to the damage you take. You can be wrangling one ghost, and another two will hit you from behind. Or a boss will cause the floor to erupt in flames right where you are standing (and you can’t see). I can honestly say that the only things that really did damage to me during the entire game were things I couldn’t see. And you can give up all idea of “battlefield awareness.” You will frequently end up in a room with multiple ghosts and other corporeal enemies – and the ghosts can often move fast. They swirl around the room, going through walls and generally maneuvering faster than you can ever hope to keep track of. It quickly becomes obvious that your only hope of success is to eliminate the corporeal threats (Which, with the exception of fliers, generally directly attack) first, then move on to the main apparitions, all while keeping an eye out for fallen teammates to revive (their icons appear on the upper right of the screen along with a compass – a handy notification).

This tactic works somewhat well – the random shots from behind get frustrating, especially later in the game when you start encountering things that can kill you in a single hit – but even more frustrating is the absolute idiocy of the other Ghostbusters. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to make them too effective – you wouldn’t want to make a game where you could just stand there while your allies beat the game for you. On the other hand, they seem to have no survival instinct whatsoever. While they are virtually useless in every fight, they are your safety valve – if they are dead, you can’t be revived. And they had a maddening tendency to huddle in tight groups to be blown away by AOE attacks, or to simply run into attacks for no rhyme or reason. To lie there incapacitated, waiting to be revived, as you watch your allies fall one by one isn’t exactly fun.

Of course, when you die, you just start over from the last checkpoint. So no big deal! Well, this is where one flaw leads to another. Ghostbusters has the distinction of having one of the best and worst loading systems I have ever seen in a game.

For starters – you never notice the load time during gameplay. All of the loading takes place during the cut-scenes and is virtually seamless. And since a big part of playing this game is seeing those cut-scenes to get the story. Without death, you can get through this game without any visible load time at all. Level -scene – level – a seamless flow.

But you do notice the load time when you start the game. Anytime you have to load from a checkpoint (meaning, you aren’t getting a cut-scene), the load time is unbearable. Its okay when the game first starts up for a session, but heaven forbid you die. Instead of springing right back into action, you get a several minute break while the game loads. Instead of being allowed to jump back in and throw yourself at a difficult target that managed to kill you, you wait – and watch the same loading cut-scene over and over. After once or twice, it literally makes you want to put the game down.

Of course, there aren’t that many moment in the game, but the dreaded difficulty spike hits a few times in this game, almost at random. You will be progressing along just fine, when all of the sudden you will be slammed with an almost impossible assortment of opponents, coming at you from all directions. And these times are never boss fights – go figure – they happen randomly in a few levels. After you finally sit through the loading screen a few times and get through the bad part – the game slips right back into super-easy mode.

The level designs are horrible. For starters, many of the levels are sprawling outdoor areas, but you have no map. Seriously – they don’t give you a map at all. Even when you aren’t in a sandbox, a map can be an incredibly useful tool. And though the levels are incredibly detailed, they are monotonous, so it is nearly impossible to know where you came from. You end up groping blindly along if you don’t have a trail to follow – and if you get lost (which happens a few times), good luck figuring out which way you were supposed to go. The rooms which do look particularly good (like the Sedgewick ballroom) quickly loose their luster when the proton streams are fired. Those are exactly like the movie, have a tendency to wash-out the entire screen, and totally kill the impact of the iconic locations. In the mundane paths, its even worse.

The voice acting is ok – but you can tell it was frequently phoned in. The worst culprit is Bill Murray – who just wasn’t into it at all. Mercifully, Venkman isn’t present for most of the game, but when he is around, his labored part is painful to sit through. Worse – he has the identical role he had in the first movie, the romantic lead – a subplot that should have been dropped all together. It seems almost as if they wrote the game assuming he wouldn’t do it, but then tacked the part on when they signed him to the deal. It was bad – bad – and it would have been better f he wasn’t in it at all. Of course, Alyssa Milano did do a passable job as his love interest, Ilyssa Sekwyn, but I really could have done without her.

Overall, I really have to say this was a great and a horrible game, all at the same time. Which makes rating it a chore. The graphics were good, but washed out, wrangling ghosts is fun, but the revival/death dance was horrible, and the plot was decent and well thought out, but the voice acting left a little to be desired.

If you are a Ghostbusters fan, play the game. If not – stay away from this game. Far, far away. This game is 100% nostalgia hype, and is only enjoyable to those who call themselves fans. The fact that it is Ghostbusters, and the fact that it hits all the right fanboy buttons makes it possible to overlook what is overall a shoddy game.

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