By Lady Ramkin

“Dear Rookie, It is our pleasure to offer you the chance to join the Ghost Busters as an Experimental Equipment Technician…”

Yes. Your childhood dream is about to come true! (No, not the sportscar one… and no… not the hot model girlfriend one either, sorry.) The one where you get to become one of the Ghostbusters! Get transported straight into the 80s and join Venkmann, Egon, Ray and Winston on an epic ghost hunt.

Don’t be scared kids. Your head might spontaneously start bobbin’ when you hear the theme song. Remain calm, this is completely natural, just let it pass.

Who You Gonna Call? He-man, He-man!

Take one museum, add a new exhibit, a woman, a dash of powerlust with a sprinkle of the occult. One thing leads to another and a gazillion floating and walking baddies are let loose into the streets of Manhattan. It’s your job as Rookie to prove you’re worthy of the Ghostbusters stamp of approval. Figure out what went wrong, kill stuff, destroy property, and don’t forget the clever comment afterwards!

Ghost Wranglin’

This one doesn’t floof around with formalities. It puts you straight into the action. You’re the new guy, and the notorious four take turns to teach you about your weapons and controls throughout the game. It also alternates between all of you running around together, to you teaming up with only one or two of the others at a time. The guys are constantly chatting among themselves, or to you about either the mission, or things you are doing / should be doing. This adds a lot of atmosphere to the game.

Your equipment basically consists of a Proton Pack (That big fancy backpack that they all wear), a PKE meter, and a Ghost Trap. The process is quite simple. You use the PKE meter to scan for ghosts. The red signal shows a hidden ghost or entity. They blue signal shows Cursed artifacts (Scanning these unlocks bonus content and cash bonuses. I suggest you read some of the artifact histories, they are quite entertaining). The green signal shows Environmental Phenomena – and acts as an indication of where to go next. You also scan every ghost or entity that you come across, which reveals a bit more about it, like weakness, attack style etc. This is useful in deciding which of your weapons to attack with.

You then choose your poison, and use one or all of your four guns to take down your enemies. Each weapon has a primary and secondary fire, ranging from Shock to Slime, all with their own unique use. Once the baddy is sufficiently drained of power, you proceed to drop the Ghost Trap, grapple the ghost, and reel it in ESPN fishing-style. The controls are quite simple once you understand the concept, and how each weapon works.

One thing I really appreciated is the fact that the other characters never really get in your way. You know that they are around, either following or leading you, but they never seemed to glitch out and try to walk over each other – or you. They are constantly strolling along chatting, and when action happens they’re right behind you. During battles they sometimes get incapacitated, and you have to revive them, and they do the same for you, so playing with four other characters around added a nice team-spirit vibe to the game.

The overall gameplay is quite smooth, and well thought out. Weapons are a fresh break-away from your standard shotgun / pistol inventory. This might count as a negative to some of you gentle creatures, who prefer to carry an arsenal of guns.

Extra: Graphic Sound Multiplayer:

You Look Familiar

The game is visually quite well done. The characters ARE the characters, they are brilliantly modeled, and if you’re a fan of the movies you’ll feel right at home with the familiar faces and places, especially Ecto 1 (the ghostmobile) and headquarters. To make you feel even more nostalgic, they’ve used the same actors from the movies to do the voice-overs in the game, which serves as a definite bonus to the quality of the game.

Like fighting hordes of enemies wave after wave? Like playing online with friends? Then you’ll enjoy the online multiplayer part of this game. Either enjoy instant action, or choose Campaign mode where you play through a series of jobs on a certain theme. Choose your Ghostbuster and choose your weapon to bust your way up the leaderboards!

Let The Credits Start Rolling

Fans of the franchise will not be disappointed. Grab a ticket back to the eighties, and enjoy a couple hours with the boys! The game is very light-hearted, not unlike the movies, and I am ashamed to say that at one stage I was quite scared, and slightly creeped out. (I blame this on a certain scary movie I watched on Halloween though, so you’ll probably find it to be quite harmless.)

As much as I enjoyed the game I found one large shortcoming. It feels like I blinked and it was gone. It feels like the developers made a “chapter” instead of a full game, and with such a good foundation and well know brand they could’ve made it bigger and better! The only reason to replay is if you want to find all the haunted artifacts, and scan all the ghosts – in other words – to go back for some achievements. For a full price title, it’s a very short game and this might leave a sour aftertaste for most.

Disclaimer: You might have a sudden craving for marshmallows at some point in this game.

Scoring

Gameplay: 7.5

Pay attention to the instructions, and you’ll get the hang of the controls very easily. Because there aren’t a million weapons to choose from, these also are a breeze to master. Quite entertaining, it gave me both a heart stopping moment, and a chuckle on more than one occasion.

Presentation: 8.0

Based on such a strong foundation this is presented superbly. It doesn’t feel like a shabby money maker. It feels solid and looks good.

Sound: 8.0

Good sound. Creepy at times, when there’re random whispers in the air, and quite chaotic at times when the characters are screaming directions, whilst blasting enemies who are screaming back. Voice acting is superb.

Value: 6.0

Approximately six hours of gameplay on the easiest difficulty setting. Will most likely take a little more time to complete on the more difficult settings.

Overall: 7.9

A great licensed game that does the movies justice, just over way too soon.