Difficulty played: Professional (Hard)
Difficulty felt: Had some challenge
Platform: Xbox 360
Time : about 12 hours
Ghostbusters the video game or as I will call it “G” was one of those games that I read about, watched it come out, read about the so-so reviews and kinda forgot about….Until I found it for sale.
First impressions of this game were muddy graphics and “wow its basically any 3rd person shooter but with Ghostbusters pasted on” and for the most part I was right but lets take a look.
The graphics were mostly meh at best some of the ghosts were fairly detailed and the character models were good enough that you could tell who each person was but the flashy-ness of the proton pack and your…uh shots?….bullets?….uhhh Stream..yeah stream made looking at anything else during action impossible anyway. What really stole the show was the proton pack…of course what kid growing up in the 80s even 90s didn’t wish they had a proton pack and boy did they give it the spit shine it deserved. The pack was amazingly detailed and displayed almost all useful information on the pack directly, much like the Dead Space RIG, only it didn’t show health, in fact there wasn’t really anyway to see your health other then the typical border of red if you are getting hurt. Another thing that jumped out at me was the amount of stuff flying around in the game, there was crap flying everywhere books desks even civil war uniforms just something I found interesting.
G takes off as a direct sequel to the first movie (seemed like they ignored the second except for the painting of Vigo in their headquarters) set in the 90s as you play as a mute new hire for the Ghostbusters team. The main enemy being the revival of Gozer the Destructor (Stay Puft) and its your job to find out what brought him back. I will say the story its self was clean and easy it all made good enough sense to watch the G-boys blast ghosts and get slimed….much like the movies. Most of the time it is you and 2-4 of the other Gbusters with ya. Obviously this being a game you do everything, at times it feels like the rest of your squad is not doing any damage to the ghosts until you get there. The dynamic of the team was very present, since you didn’t really have a life bar you could easily die by silly things or in some cases (playing on hard) a single hit would kill you. That’s when one of the other Gbusters would come over and revive you or if they were knocked out you would run to their aid as well. Thankfully this wasn’t such an annoyance, even though the Computer players were dumb often running directly into an attack, they didn’t die easy and it felt like my butt was being carried by them more then the other way around.
I personally love Ghostbusters (duh) and was super thrilled to see that the entire cast of the movies was voice acting. Also I was equally happy to hear familiar songs from the movies as well (not just the theme) really helped make the game feel like I was in the Ghostbusters universe..so to say. Now obviously the theme song was in the game, shoot every time you died you got to hear the song while it loaded, however it was only the first 5 – 10 seconds of the song….like as soon as they started to sing the loading would finish and you would be back in game. Outside of that they NEVER played the theme song, in game there were a few scenes were the Gboys had to take off from their headquarters to go to take a call…as in who you gonna call… but instead of the good ole theme we get some weird guitar riff. Even in the credits at the end of the game it gets to “how you gonna call?….Ghostbusters” and then cuts to some lame stock music…I mean they obviously had the licensing rights to the song so I don’t know why they wanted to nix it completely.
Some minor complaints.
Half of what made the G movies so great was the comedy of it all. We are dealing with end of the world shit but you can count on Peter to say something silly. Now the writing was there, just like the movies, but for some reason (maybe load times with the game) the delivery was all off. Its hard to explain unless you play the game since I ain’t no writer (as if you cant tell) but once you do play the game you will have the same like wtf that was odd look on your face too.
The end boss came out of nowhere, now I knew that I was nearing the end but it was just like OH ITS BOSS TIME NOW! nothing major just odd again as if they cut a part out.
When you are playing you can collect “cursed artifacts” or hidden junk in the game. I’m pretty collect happy so I scoured for all the items and without using the interwebs I missed something or somethings, but there is no record of what I missed or when I missed it… so unless I wanted to look it up I would have to play the entire game again to find what I missed….but I guess this is 2011 who doesn’t use the web…Me I don’t like to cheat. And yes that’s cheating, there is an achievement if you find all the artifacts if you use a guide to find them you cheated…suck it.
Final good thoughts. The game was actually full of fun G fan-service and was a lot of fun to play with the full arsenal and I doubt I will trade it in. The boss battles themselves were huge and epic, when you finally destroyed a boss you would look around and think “boy this place is destroyed”. The games pacing was pretty well done however I think they showed their hand too early in the first few levels as it quickly turned into a dungeon crawler..not that there is anything wrong with that. All in all if you are a really big fan of the movies I would highly recommend this game if not then you may want to just borrow it from me, but if you do borrow it just remember….
I Beat It First.
No