Ghostbusters: I LOOKED AT THE GAME RAY! (Review)

1995, I huddle close to the TV as the Ecto-1 screeches out of the Ghostbuster’s HQ and tears down the Manhattan streets with the goddamn iconic theme song playing on and on as my tiny four year old brain laps it all up while my stressed mother shouts at me to “TURN THE F***ING VOLUME DOWN!” But I don’t listen because the silly woman doesn’t understand what the movie I am watching means to me. Simply put, I was a Ghostbusters fan the moment the song hit my TV screen. I watched it dozens, if not hundreds of times, and I forced every single one of my friends to watch it as well, and if they didn’t like it then they weren’t my friends much long after that.

2009, now seventeen and less mature, Atari is kind enough to share with me a copy of the new Ghostbusters game. My expectations are that it’ll be at least decent. In my experience movie based games are rarely something to scream about, but as I put the disk into my PS3 a little voice says “but Jack, it’s GHOSTBUSTERS!” Oh how tight you are my little inside voice, now shut up until the next counselling meeting damn you.

The Ghostbusters game, plainly titled Ghostbusters: The Video Game, because it’s as if innovative game titles are the spawn of Satan these days, takes place post- both of the original two movies. Straight off the bat Terminal Reality scores major points for sticking with the original cast. Oh yes folks, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and Dan Akroyd in a video game! But we don’t get to play as them. Oh no, we take the pack of the new recruit, who Peter forbids giving his name and simply dubs him ‘the Rookie.’ Rookie is the teams new guinea pig. He tests the experimental equipment Egon cooks up; that is pretty much why he’s not allowed to give his name so the team won’t get too attached to their new pet, on the slightly high chance that he dies…

This leads to a lot of in-game humor that I will shamelessly say made me grin more than once. The developers did a great job injecting that Ghostbusters vibe into the game. Peter is as relaxed as ever in the face of total reality destruction; Egon is still the science nerd with the sometimes funny one-liners; Ray is still the childish heart of the team; and Winston is as overlooked as ever…yup. The old-fashioned spirit of the movie is un-mistakably there and the new guy, although he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t mess it up and there are some moments when he’s in some pretty good gags.

So if it was a movie- I’d give it a full five stars now, because I wuv my Ghostbusters, and call it a day. But no, Mr. Perry does not want that and so on I bloody go. When you first learn to play, you have the most awkward and annoying tutorial possible. You have to catch Slimer. So you blast away as Slimer, struggling to get the photon beam on the mark, pausing every so often to reloa – I mean vent the Photon gun, then the little b****** flies away and you have to take on another new ghost! Ray is on hand to help but is impossible to hear over the wails of the flying ghost and blasts of the Photon gun; maybe if it was Peter I’d have tried harder to listen but it wasn’t, so I didn’t. After you manage to wrangle that one ghost and then hammer the square button to deploy a trap, you then just drag the ghost over it and pray to god it doesn’t struggle free. Tutorial complete, basement destroyed, job’s a good one.

On to the first level and you start to get the hang of it a bit. Catching ghosts becomes much less…frustrating. You learn how to trust the gun’s aim and you’re quickly on the way to mastering it. You then get to grips with the legendary PKE meter and scan around for any Ectoplasm, that disturbingly resembles man juice at times. From there you encounter more ghosts and an EPIC return of Mr. Stay Puft, for which I DID blame on Ray, as you go against foes fresh and old, with four varieties of the Photon pack at your disposal as well as the power to CROSS THE STREAMS! Oh yeah! You even get a trophy for it. You have your standard Photon Blast, Boson Darts, a ice-like cryokinesis stasis beam/shotgun, the slime blower/slime tether, and the heavy hitting Meson Collider that works much like the Bullseye from the Resistance series. The game also counts the damage you do to the world around you, and subtracts damage from your overall pay. By scanning ghosts with the PKE, you’ll learn what equipment is the most effective against them. Once you weaken them down, you deploy the trap and then catch them in one of several ways. Then straight forward with the Photon beam and drag them in. Use the Slime tether and tie them to the trap, instant catch. Slam them into it, again, with the Photon beam. Or freeze them and catch them then. Different methods, same result. It plays well with no real issues aside the learning curve of the actual gun itself. It’s very unlikely that you’ll finish the game with less than $10,000 in public damage unless you have God-like aim.

Presentation wise, it looks fine. Thankfully the cast looks like their desirable version from the movie, which is something some movie games don’t even bother with; (glaring at you Terminator Salvation) and the best part of all is Bill Murray looks like Bill f***ing Murray. Oh yes. Everything else doesn’t really matter, but since you’re interested the levels aren’t fantastic. They’re designed well enough and look good enough to pass as an animated movie, which I’m trying to convince myself that it is- as well as convincing myself there will NOT be a third live action film, odds are that it’ll go tits up.

Now there is ONE HUGE PROBLEM I have with this game. The online. I think it’s broken. I spent the entire time from 7pm Wednesday to 1am Thursday trying to get a decent game only to get a variety of messages saying the connection has been lost. Then when I hosted a game, nobody joined. When I did finally get online I had a reasonably enjoyable time with it. I selected the Stasis equipment and went out with two Italians to the museum level and started the hunt. Then about two hours later, and only about seven or eight games, I got frustrated with the lack of compliance from the Ghostbusters servers and went back to the main game and started playing it on hard, cause I’m a manly man who enjoys a challenge after acing  it on Normal. Now I found a second problem. I LOVE the Ghostbuster theme song Terminal Reality- don’t get me wrong- so PLEASE stop playing it EVERY single time I die during the long and very much unwanted loading session to restart the game. On Normal I never died, more than twice, and so I didn’t realize this; but it ruins the flow of gameplay and by the time I reached Mr. Stay Puft: The Return, I was sick to the back of my teeth of seeing a close up of the Photon Pack and listening to the theme song over and over and over again.

Despite that and the online difficulties, there is a decent amount of upgrades to buy and cursed artifacts to find. The game is almost like the third movie, (to be honest if it was then I wouldn’t complain) with lots of old favorite bits mixed in with new and refreshing ideas. Gameplay will vary on choice of the weapon; the story is good and the dialogue is great with the same humour that made the movies such big hits.

We Loved

The Cast

The Single Player Mode

The Equipment

The Movie-like Comedy

The extras

Bill Murray!

We Disliked

The long load screens after you die

The learning curve for the shooting

The online’s hesitation to bother letting you play it most of the time

The lackluster effect crossing the streams has. I expected a thermo-nuclear blast that’d be soo pretty it’d melt my face off and instead I fall over.

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Mercifully, Ghostbusters escaped the general “Movie Games” are bad pattern, and has actually made this diehard fan happy with the end product. The single player isn’t epically long. For a video game it’s movie length, and it makes that work. The developers took their time with this game and it will really show as you play through it. Dialouge is great. plot fits nicely, Dan Akroyd is in it and BEST of all…Bill Murray that beast of a man is in it too! On the negative side, I’m not into the online, because it doesn’t work eight of ten tries, so I will not recommend it for those looking for a game with a lot of depth to it. The trophies/achievements only go so far, even with some of the coolest names ever. Fans of the film, don’t pass this up as it’s as good as a third movie as we’re going to get, cause odds are the next one WILL suck. If your not a fan, I recommend you go rent it out…or swipe it from your friends…or…just get it.

Tags: Bill Murray Ghostbusters PC proton pack PS3 review xbox360