Ghostbusters: The Video Game

As a special Valentine's Day present for my dear girlfriend, I got her the Ghostbusters video game as she highly enjoys the movies. After watching her play it and finish it, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it and play it myself. And let me tell you, it's just as fun to watch as it is to play.

The game takes place in 1991, 2 years after Ghostbusters 2, and sets you in the shoes of a new recruit to the Ghostbusters team, known affectionately as "Rookie" and various other nicknames. I think his name is technically mentioned by Ray (Dan Akroyd) at one point, but that's all you hear of it. For the most part, as they initially explain, you're the guy who carries around and initially tests out all their highly advanced and possibly dangerous equipment. As such you remain nameless so that, as Venkman (Bill Murray) says, they don't get too attached.

As you might be able to tell already, almost every single person who was involved in the movies was pretty much involved in this game. Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis all lend their voices as the Ghostbusters, Annie Potts returns as the secretary Janine, William Atherton returns as Walter Peck, hell, even Max Von Sydow provides the voice of the now trapped Vigo, who you can interact with by talking to his painting. AND, possibly the best part is that it's written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis who wrote both films as well. Both Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis are noticeably absent, especially since the story even mentions Dana Barrett several times, but it doesn't detract from all the awesome.

Right after suiting up with the infamous proton pack, a massive psionic shockwave (or something like that) pulses through the city, releasing Slimer from his windowed captivity box. You track him into the basement and get your first taste of wrangling a ghost.

Using the proton pack is just as destructive and fun as it looks in the movies. Each ghost has a circle of health shown around your crosshairs, which you slowly knock down by hitting them with your stream. The fun part is that the ghosts move around just as much as you expect they would, practically forcing you to leave burn marks, broken pillars, and a wave of destruction in your wake. Once the ghosts are at a sufficiently low health, you throw your trap, put a capture stream on the ghost whereby you literally try to wrangle the ghost into the trap with the right analog stick. You can also slam it around to stun it, causing more mayhem in the process. Once you get it above the trap, the trap opens up and you have to keep the ghost from escaping the light it emits. Do so, and congrats, you've captured a ghost.

Later on the proton pack receives several upgrades, such as a shotgun like Shock Blaster, a green slime stream, and the Meson Collider which acts in practically the exact same way as the Bullseye in Resistance: Fall of Man. Each of these modes also has a special secondary fire. The proton stream fires a big explosion called a Boson Dart. The Shock Blaster lets loose a stasis stream that will freeze ghosts if you keep it on them long enough. The slimer shoots out a slime tether, which can be used to trap enemies to a single spot and is also used in many puzzles throughout the game. The Meson Collider's secondary fire is essentially normal rapid fire, but will track to any spot you've "painted" with the powerful normal fire.

Of course, with all these weapons the types of enemies you face are bound to be weak to one weapon or another, and the way you tell is the PKE meter. In the movies, this is the little sensor thing they hold up to scan areas that has those funny little arms that move up whenever they're close to ghostly energy. In the game's case, it's coupled with what are basically night-vision goggles that let you see invisible trails left by ghosts. You use the PKE meter as a kind of "am I getting hotter or colder?" way of tracking ghosts, along with finding "relics", funny little objects that you can look for and collect. There's no real point to it except for the trophies and the often funny stories associated with them, but it's still fun to hunt them down. You also use the PKE meter for the all-important task of scanning new ghosts you encounter so you can tell what they are, how they attack, and what best to use against them. They too come with often hilarious stories about what they did when alive and why they're now ghosts.

Really there isn't much bad to say about this game, but to be fair...it's short. Like, roughly 8 hours or so short. There is a multiplayer mode I haven't tried out yet, so that could add quite a bit of time to it. Also, while blasting ghosts is quite fun, the battles do get a bit repetitive. You face essentially two types of enemies. Minion-like ghosts that you can just blast and kill, and ghosts you need to trap. While each ghost requires a certain strategy to kill it as fast as possible, after the 30th time of slamming ghosts into your trap it just feels a bit old. Also, you revisit locations in the game, and I always hate when games make you do that, as if the designers were just too lazy to make a completely new area. It's especially bad considering there are only about 7 missions total. Thankfully each of the different areas are quite different from each other and easy to distinguish, so there is variety in that sense.

Also, at many points the difficulty of the game ratchets up to the insane with ghosts attacking you from all directions and making you fall as quickly as you get up. Thankfully the team AI in this game is pretty darn good, though you will want to scream at them when they all stand together and get wiped out by a single area attack. The nice thing is that even though you fall fairly easily, it's only a simple matter of a teammate walking over to you (and vice versa if they fall) and helping you up. As long as at least one teammate is alive, the game continues. It helps keep up the action, and really makes you care about keeping your fellow Ghostbusters alive. The unfortunate thing is that in some levels there are just so many enemies who can knock you down with a single hit that you'll find yourself reloading some checkpoints many many times.

And, I just have to say it...the story is bad. There's some major fan service in letting you battle some familiar faces like Slimer, and that's fun, but the overall complicated plot involving mandalas, the Architect, Gozer and Shandor and all sorts of nonsense (most of which is basically done away with in the final mission, making you wonder what the point was) just doesn't quite work that well. It's all very silly and convoluted, which is kind of what Ghostbusters is, but at the same time it just doesn't hold much water.

Nonetheless the voiceovers are perfect, the jokes and banter are hilarious, and the combat is for the most part fun. It's an enjoyable romp that makes you feel just like you were a rookie Ghostbuster hanging out with his heroes, and at the end of the day, what more could you ask for?

Ghostbusters: The Video Game gets an 8.5/10.