Who ya gonna call!?
If you were a kid during the stretch from 1984 to 1991 chances are really good that you watched, loved and wanted to be a Ghostbuster. From the original, to the sequel in 1989 and the cartoon, Ghostbusters has been a huge part of my life. I still have the mental scars from my older brother making me "be the ghost" while he pummeled me with the foam proton stream that came with the toy proton packs, and don't even get me started on Hi-C Ecto Cooler. Just in time for the Ghostbusters 25th anniversary, the good folks at Atari and Terminal Reality have brought us Ghostbusters: The Video Game. Written by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd and voiced by all of the original Ghostbusters cast this game couldn't feel more authentic, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't love every second of it.
Set during Thanksgiving 1991, two years after Ghostbusters II, players take on the role of "The Rookie" who's been brought on by Ray and Egon to test all of their experimental new equipment. You're basically a walking test dummy, because as they state, it's your job to test anything that could potentially blow the official Ghostbusters "to New Jersey." Whew, we wouldn't want that happening, so of course, we'll volunteer. But this game is not simply standing on a firing range "testing" the new weapons, oh no, you'll be field testing them...on ghosts...like a Ghostbuster...This is where Ghostbusters: The Video Game really shines.
Immersion in a video game is always something that developers strive for as it helps you feel connected to the game, the characters and the story. Terminal Reality definitely succeed. They pull what I'll call a "Gordon Freeman" as your character is typically referred to as "Rookie" and he doesn't speak, allowing the player to feel how they want to about the situation. It really helped to suck me into the game that much more. You really feel like you're a Ghostbuster. From the back and forth banter between the Ghostbusters to the actual act of busting ghosts you really feel like you're part of a team.
The gameplay is great, you find yourself busting ghosts and destroying possessors quickly and quite often. You wear the ghosts down with standard proton stream bombardment. When they get significantly weakened you can snare them in the cage-like Capture Stream and slam them around to daze them. Then simply throw out your trap and wrangle them in, another one bites the dust.To break up the action there is a lot of exploration and puzzle solving to be done. You're given several upgraded Proton Packs as the game progresses ranging from the Slime Thrower that fans will remember from Ghostbusters II to all new gadgets like the Meson Collider and Dark Matter Pack that each have different abilities and rates of fire. Concepts are also borrowed from other games, for example the packs all have secondary rates of fire, like most military shooters these days. Ranging from the Proton Packs Boson Dart which is basically the ghost busting equivalent of the gun mounted grenade launcher to the Dark Matter Packs Stasis Beam that progressively freezes ghosts. All packs as well as the PKE meter and ghost traps are upgradable as well. The health system and a lot of the environmental touches also have a very Dead Space Lite feel to them. Your health is displayed as a green horizontal meter and your packs current temperature is a vertical meter that progressively turns red your pack heats up until it restarts and vents the built up heat automatically. Or you can just vent it manually which will definitely come in handy in high enemy areas.
Ghostbusters is far from perfect though, as several design issues have kept it from feeling like the definitive ghost busting experience. First, the controls felt counter intuitive to me. The main fire button is the right trigger while venting your pack is the right bumper. The secondary fire is mapped to the left trigger and the Proton Pack-only setting of Capture Stream is the left bumper. I would have at the very least reversed the capture stream and secondary fire. I also would have reversed the "use object" and "sprint/evade" buttons which are on X/A and Circle/B respectively. Thankfully the face buttons are at the very least mappable. The in game FMV sequences, while great looking with very accurate recreations of our Ghostbusters in their prime leave a little to be desired. Sometimes the lip synching is off or just generally looks wonky and models can look a little robotic sometimes. The AI, while very good at not getting itself killed and actually being helpful can feel a little lazy sometimes. You find yourself taking the lead from the seasoned Busters which, if you're supposed to feel like a rookie, is kind of the opposite of what you should be doing. The difficulty also spikes at oddly random periods. There's a section as you're chasing down Stay Puft where you get bombarded by other ghosts where the difficulty just becomes brutal as you get blindsided by projectile slinging hobo ghosts while taking down opera ghosts and flaming stone gargoyles. There's also a stretch with dive bombing cherubs that was rather frustrating though not entirely brutal.
But if you can see past the issues, and if you're an especially huge Ghostbusters fan the sheer joy of busting ghosts will be enough to make you see past these flaws. Throw in the witty back-and-forth banter and spot on performances from the Busters, Janine and Peck, tons of collectibles and ghosts to scan with your PKE meter plus the inclusion of a very tight online component and you will find yourself coming back to bust ghosts, on and off line.
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D Pads out of 5
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