Ghostbusters: The Video Game Review
Who ya gonna call?
June 8, 2009 - Let's get this out of the way: I'm a Ghostbusters Super-Fan. It's my favorite movie, I own a jumpsuit, a movie-accurate Proton Pack and I even cried during an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters when Slimer accidentally killed Eduardo... keep in mind that this was a cartoon that aired when I was in high school. Personally, I like the idea of people reviewing games from franchises they love because I feel like they'll be tougher on a property than your average reviewer, but that's my opinion. You're an IGN reader -- you get pissed when a non-fan reviews a game and you get pissed when an admitted fan reviews a game, so there's no way to win.
Anyway, still here? Awesome; Ghostbusters: The Video Game is very good.
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Set in 1991, two years after the events of Ghostbusters 2, this title finds the boys in gray moving onto the next chapter in the world of paranormal investigations and eliminations -- namely, expanding the team. You'll join the squad as an experimental weapons technician with the sole purpose of testing Egon's latest Proton Pack modifications. Within moments of showing up on the job, a strange wave of ghostly energy emanates from a museum packing a Gozer exhibit and spreads across New York City. The spiritual spike gets every ghoul in the five boroughs riled up, the boys get to work and a devious master plan is set in motion.
This game is meant to be the third movie in the franchise, and with that in mind, we have to talk about presentation right off the bat. The game opens detailing the ghostly explosion in a beautiful cutscene -- all the computer-generated movies look great with lots of detail and animations -- and we're launched into the Ghostbusters theme just like when the Gray Lady scared the librarian in the first movie and when Dana caught up to Oscar's carriage in the second film. These nifty scenes will continue along with the soundtrack from the original movie throughout the game and setup the tale. There are dips in this presentation value -- which I'll get to in a bit -- but these touches are pulled right from the movie and drop you into this third-person shooter with a specific story to tell (i.e. don't expect to choose your next job GTA-style).
To immerse you in the experience, your noob Ghostbuster character doesn't speak and isn't given a name other than "rookie." In the game, it's explained that this nameless move is to keep the core four from getting attached in case a device goes haywire and puts the whippersnapper out of commission, but in reality, it's so you can just sit back and play your part as the real Ghostbusters banter with each other in the tech-heavy dialogue and comedic one-liners you'd expect.
![[IMG]](http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/992/992635/ghostbusters-the-video-game-20090608034953910-000.jpg)
Maybe now you'll never slime a guy with a positron collider, huh?
For me, this works quite well. If you haven't been paying attention, the four original Ghostbusters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson) are back to lend their voices along with the team's receptionist (Annie Potts) and the dickless wonder known as Walter Peck (William Atherton) so you really don't need some new guy getting in the way of the dialogue, which was penned in part by the films' original writers Aykroyd and Ramis. I'm sure many would want to create their own character, but when you see some of the facial animations in the CG cutscenes and how the experience plays as a whole, I think you'll forgive the omission.
OK. So, the game feels a lot like a movie -- we've even got a new love interest for Venkman in Dr. Ilyssa Selwyn, who is voiced by Alyssa Milano -- but you're probably more concerned with how it plays. A third-person shooter, your Ghostbusters experience is told from the behind-the-back perspective. Rather than have the screen littered with health bars and HUDs (the screen will get red as you take damage and display a running damage total as you blast objects in an environment), your Proton Pack will serve as your hub of in-game information. By monitoring the meter on the right side of the device, you can see how close to overheating you are; yes, to give you some restraints, liberties were taken with the device so that you now have to vent the pack to keep it from overheating and taking you out of the game for an extended period of time.
The pack is also your visual representation for which weapon mode you are in. Rather than limit you to just a proton stream, Egon will have outfitted you pack with a total of four firing modes by the time all is said and done. The first mode is the classic Proton Pack from the movies but packs a Boson Dart (a ball of condensed energy that explodes on impact) as a secondary fire. By tapping left on your D-pad, you'll switch to your dark matter functions, which causes some blue lights and gizmos to pop out of the pack. These dark blue attacks include the shotgun-like Shock Blast and Stasis Stream that slows enemies to a crawl. The Meson Collider is assigned to Right on the D-Pad -- which causes an antenna crackling with electricity to come out of the pack -- and tags a ghoul with a tracker and then rapidly fires particles at the enemy. Finally, the Slime Blower is down on the D-Pad and can be used to coat enemies and objects in positively charged goo or as a Slime Tether that draws two objects together. This beaut turns the four red lights green and causes a slime reservoir to rise out of the pack.
Now, let's be honest: we all expected Ghostbusters to suck. That's not a comment about Terminal Reality, Atari, or anyone else involved in the project, it's just one of those things videogame fans have come to terms with: most games connected to the movie industry end up sucking. Ghostbusters bucks the trend in a few different ways, but the weapon options are high on that list. Being able to hit a specter with one end of a Slime Tether, attach the other end to a trap, and watch as the sprit is quickly pulled into the trap is great. Watching Ray's proton stream sail past your head and help wrestle a ghoul is fun. On top of the fact that you're getting these devices every now and again to keep you on your toes, there are also 20 upgrades you can buy along the way to supe-up the experience (you're earning cash for every beast you bust). Sure, the Meson Collider and Dark Matter weapons are forgettable and don't really need to be used, but the other half of the Twinkie is great.
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In early previews, I openly worried that the game could become pretty mundane and repetitive if it was just trapping ghost after ghost, but thankfully, the final product dodges that bullet by dropping in these weapons and keeping the spirit types fresh. Sure, you're chasing the librarian and Stay Puft, but new poltergeists such as hobo ghosts and spirits that possess your friends keep things fresh and entertaining. Who doesn't like walking in on a Union/Confederate ghost war or battling a hulking demon made of red-hot embers?
When you run into one of these new apparitions, you can scan them with your PKE meter to discover if they need to be trapped or blasted to bits, but this move will also log them in your copy of Tobin's Spirit Guide. There are 55 ghosts to log, and once you have them, you can check out their unique back stories as well as weapon weaknesses from your PKE Meter (the back of the device serves as your pause screen and has a slew of stats and files to scope).
While you're running around zapping and trapping, your PKE Meter will be on your hip chirping away. When you bring it up via a face button, the POV drops to first-person from behind your Para-goggles (almost like night vision with vital information popping up), with the meter in the middle of the screen. You'll follow the peaking bars on the meter to enemies (red bars), objectives (green bars), and hidden artifacts (blue bars). The artifacts are another set of Easter eggs for you to find. If you want to ignore them, you can, but if you keep an ear out for your PKE meter and play the game of hot and cold, you'll uncover 42 of these gems that each have a tale connected to them. You can read the stories from the start screen and see any objects you've found in the firehouse.
Although you're not given free reign of New York City, you will get to fool around the firehouse in between missions. You can slide down the pole, eavesdrop on Janine's telephone calls, play with the jumping toaster on the pool table and more. None of it really affects the story, but it's a neat distraction that lets you feel like you're really a Ghostbuster. Environments are actually pretty diverse in this game. Like I said, I was worried about everything becoming the same old same old by the end of the game, but the decision to take you from Times Square to the library to a parallel dimension and so on keeps you guessing as to what will happen next. At times these levels are bright and colorful (the kitchen battle in the Sedgewick), dark and twisted (the 13th floor of the hotel), creepy as hell (the children's reading room in the library that is filled with disembodied kid voices and eerie handprints all over the wall).
![[IMG]](http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/992/992635/ghostbusters-the-video-game-20090608034956988-000.jpg)
You can believe Mr. Pecker.
I mean, there was one part where I was in this spooky graveyard and had to use the Slime Tether to pull open a gate. When the job was done, the Ecto-1 and the rest of the boys rolled on in and we set off to fight a bunch of purple cultist ghosts -- there was this moment where I realize how cool all this was. Here I am blowing up zombie dudes while an angry portal is swirling in the sky and the Ecto-1 is rolling to my right. Rad.
The gameplay can run into trouble every now and again. Seeing as how the story is driven by the core four almost the whole time, you'll sometimes run into spots where you need to wait or move to a specific spot so that one of them will say something and advance the level. Often when they say these things, they're not looking at each other and are kind of just staring off into space. You'll also run into rather pissy difficulty spikes every now and again. I consider myself a pretty accomplished Ghostbuster player, but when I got to a part later in the game that needed me to Slime Tether some flying stone angels to a door, I nearly flipped my desk in anger. The level would begin and these damn things would just dive in and instantly kill me. Sure, as long as one of the other Ghostbusters is still on his feet, he can come revive you (you can revive them as well) and continue the level, but somehow these concrete bastards were killing Ray and I at the exact same time so I couldn't save him and he couldn't save me. Urge to kill rising.
Still, those complaints shouldn't turn you off to this game because it's so much fun to bust spirits on your own and they definitely shouldn't sour you when you take into account that this title has a pretty nifty multiplayer component. Here, you'll enter into matches with three other online Ghostbusters -- you can be any member of the original four as well as the brand new rookie -- and see who can earn the most cash by bagging ghosts. Your cash is logged at the end of a match and acts as experience points so that you ascend through the 20 levels of Ghostbuster ranks. Aside from leaderboards, the game also catalogs everything you've done from the number of ghosts trapped to the times you've been knocked out.
There are four campaigns (which are the teaming of three level parts) for you and the team to go through, but these are just pulled from the six job types that you can tackle. Containment simply asks you to trap as many ghosts as you can in a given time limit, Survival will go for as long as you can stay alive and keep time on the clock by trapping spirits, Destruction means you and the team have to destroy a set number of evil relics, Slime Dunk is a competition to see who can dunk Slimer into the trap the most times, Protection has you guarding some of Egon's equipment and you'll have to keep some pesky spirits from making off with artifacts in Thief.
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For my money, blasting relics in Destruction was a bit ho-hum and protecting PKE poles in Protection could get frustrating seeing as how the bad guys keep respawning, but the other modes were actually a lot of fun. Slime Dunk is just a frantic fight to get a hold of the green guy and toss him in some of the preset traps; you can't die in this competition, so expect your "teammates" to blast you out of commission every now and again so that they have the playing field all to themselves. In other modes, you should probably keep the other players alive so that the missions keep going. The online games run as well as the single-player levels; meaning there was no lag in my matches. Although, Venkman's head did look weird from behind -- like his hair was layered goofily.
If the modes, levels to attain, and ability to play as Ernie Hudson weren't enough to keep you coming back, there are also 20 rare ghosts that will occasionally pop up in the levels. Catch'em all!
Of course, like any game, Ghostbusters isn't perfect -- especially in that presentation aspect I wrote about in the beginning. Although the CG scenes look great, the in-game cutscenes can't hold a candle to the polish of the former. Lip sync will seem off at places (laughably so in the cutscene after the library chapter), the characters are standing a bit too rigidly and so on. It's that double-edged sword of using a property people know so well -- we know how the actors are supposed to speak and act, so when there's a miscue, it's obvious. In that same vein -- as happy as I am to have all the actors back on board -- Bill Murray sounds like he's doing an impression of Peter Venkman at times; he's always got this smarmy tone to his voice and he doesn't seem to genuinely care about the team. Perhaps this is just the progression of his character because the Ghostbusters are a big hit nowadays, but it definitely isn't the human, well-rounded Peter from the films. Plus, the whole Peter/Ilyssa love story never really had any spark so it... it seems forced in the end.
If you're looking for more audio commentary, I wish the fine folks at Terminal Reality and Atari could've created some new music or borrowed from Ghostbusters 2. Sure, I love having the original soundtrack on board, but that was designed for a two-hour movie. By the end of the game, you're going to have heard the same handful of songs repeated several times at different places in the title.
In terms of being a nitpicky fan, the game's pretty good at not making a ton of continuity errors. Being able to explore the firehouse in between is pretty darn cool. However, you can go listen to the Vigo painting spout phrases, but that doesn't make any sense because that painting was destroyed at the end of Ghostbusters 2. Similarly, when the hell did Winston get a PhD? Didn't he just walk in off the street in the original film? Here, he just nonchalantly drops in that he spent a lot of time in a particular part of the museum while working on his doctorate. I guess the movies didn't document exactly what happened in the five years between GB and GB2 and an additional two years that have passed since the last film in this game, but it's still weird.
Now, as great as the game can look graphically, it also has a number of stumbles along with the shoddy in-game scenes and stiff characters. For starters, a lot of the cutscenes look like they were compressed in low quality; you'll see pixilization here and there. Also, everyone's hair could use some more work -- it's like you can see it being layered in places and it's all shimmery. Plus, there's noticeable screen-tearing when you spin the camera in busy areas like Slimer's ballroom and so on. These issues aren't deal breakers, but they're there and keep the title from being as impressive as it could've been.
![[IMG]](http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/992/992635/ghostbusters-the-video-game-20090608034950660-000.jpg)
Slime saves everyone.
For all the fanboys out there who want to beat their chests about which system got it right, there are some differences between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of this game. The PS3 features an eight-minute, 4 GB install that apparently doesn't do much seeing as how it takes both games about 30 seconds to load after a death or load a mission from the main screen. Although the PS3 has exclusive videos about refurbishing Ecto-1 and the Blu-ray trailer, the graphics seem to be a touch dumbed down on Sony's system. When you proton stream burns a wall on the 360, there's a black gouge in the wall that features smoldering embers and bits of fire. On the PS3, you get the fire and black gouge, but the little embers embedded in the cut don't make it. Similarly, when you attack Stay Puft on Microsoft's console, you're making dramatic changes to his puffy exterior. On the PS3, these changes aren't as severe -- it's almost like a bruise rather than a fiery cut. Still, I'll save you the suspense and tell you both versions are getting the same score for graphics because the overall package is solid on each platform.
Closing Comments
If you dug the movies, there's no reason that you should be disappointed with Ghostbusters: The Video Game. There are some moments that cause the game to stumble, but you're getting a new tale in the Ghostbusters canon, fun gameplay, a whole bunch of stuff to destroy, and some cool ghosts to scan. I felt that the game's ending was a bit flat and the romantic interest was forced, but Ghostbusters is a hell of a ride.
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