This game is fun, funny, and chocked full of references to excite fans of the movies. A must have. Who you gonna call?
This game uses the same basic idea we've seen in titles like the old Goonies game on the NES and later Stranglehold on the current platforms. The video game is given the royal treatment as a full-fledged sequel to the last movie. This is a true blessing for fans of the films who were wating for this game. The story for this new game was written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis (who also play Ray and Egon), same as the fims. The voice talent is just that, featuring the return of all 4 Ghostbusters: Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, Ernie Hudson, Harold Ramis, and even Annie Pots as the Ghostbusters' secretary, Janine Melnitz. The cast even features the return of William Atherton as Walter Peck, and another visit from Brian Doyle-Murray who is now the mayor of NYC. This all helps to heighten the joy that drooling fan-boys like myself experienced playing this title.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Obviously, having been raised in the golden era of the Ghostbusters (Both films AND the animated TV series) I am overly attached to this game so I am willing to over-look some of the errors that periodically popped up while playing this game. So my score of 8.5 has a 1 point bias because I'm such a nerd.
The story of this game is pretty much on par with the last two films. It takes place just a few short years after the squad reforms and foils the plans of Vigo The Carpathian. The Museum of Natural History is opening a new exhibit. The subject of this particular exhibit is the legendary subject of fear, loathing, and fanatical worship: Gozer the Gozarian. Gee, what could possibly go wrong with trying to meddle with objects and artifacts from a deity that nearly destroyed NYC once before? Oh yeah, through an odd series of events which, it seems could only have come from the collective minds of Ramis and Akroyd, Gozer and his most loyal follower Ivo Shandor (NOTE: Again, this review is for fans so I'm not going to explain these references) are now attempting to not only resurrect themselves, but destroy the membrane dividing the real world from the ghost world and plunge NYC into a hellish nightmare from which it will never emerge. This story sees the introduction of Peter Venkman's "love interest" for this story (Love interest should be read "Infatuation he gets over") Dr. Ilyssa Selwyn (voiced my Alyssa Milano!). She is the one over-seeing the Gozer Exhibit. Now the Ghostbusters have to rescue the girl and the city, couty, and state of New York from utter annihilation at the hands of the departed (again).
This would be a good time to explain why I refered to the reader (and obviously the potential player) as the new recruit. The method of incorporating the player into the game was to give the Ghostbusters a new rookie in training that they are considering adding to their ranks. You also get to test all of their new experimental equipment. You would think that as the guinea pig you'd also be the grunt. That isn't true. More often than not you have a senior 'buster by your side in case the situation gets bad. In the final couple of stages you do take it more on your own but most of that is the supernatural conspiring to seperate the 5 of you. The protagonist is like so many others, silent. You can't customize your appearance or anything and he appears in cutscenes often. The silent protagonist angle is supposed to help immerse you into the title so that you feel more like YOU are the star but not being able to tweak your appearance (or even gender, for the lady Ghostbusters) helps to negate the benefit of the silent protagonist. They should have gone ahead and given him a voice.
Back to the story: It features some nice little twists here and there and the story is a good, coherent narrative that is definitely worthy of the Ghostbusters' lineage.
The visual presentation is nice. You can turn off the traditional HUD because most of the information that could be there is visible on your proton pack. This is a nice feature and helps to lend to the cinematic mentality. If a fellow Ghostbuster goes down then an element of the HUD comes up, a portrait of the down Ghostbuster with a compass around it to guide you to them.
As an added touch to the visual references to the movies the soundtrack seems to be predominately samples from the original motion picutre scores. Off the top of my head I'm actually hard pressed to name a portion of the score I heard that I couldn't site as being a part of the films.
The story unfolds in a linear progression, with each massive level interspersed with checkpoints to make it easier to put down if you have to or restart from if you fail. In each level there are a couple of collectible side jobs to undertake. Each level features some "Cursed Artifacts" that you can hunt down (with the aid of the PKE meter) and each ghost you encounter can be "Scanned" (again, with the PKE meter) and the data is collected and entered into "Tobin's Spirit Guide". These are fun enough and help to pass the time. However, I would have liked to see the game sandbox in some way and Janine would just report new jobs to you and then you and your fellow 'busters ride triumphantly to the resuce in Ecto 1.
In between the missions you find yourself back in the Ghostbusters' rennovated fire house. Here, any Cursed Artifacts you've collected will be scattered around the place. In the fire house you also get to hear Janine answering phone calls (her half of each conversation being hilarious) and can find some references to the movies. On the second floor, sitting on a pool table, is the Dancing Toaster that was filled with positively charged slime. It even dances when you interact with it. On the first floor, near Janine's desk, is the giant portrait of Vigo from the same film. When you interact with it, it has a few things to say. Now, fan-boys can point out that the portrait of Vigo was actually destroyed in the end of the 2nd film, replaced with a portrait of the Ghostbusters themselves. It seems like the firehouse was to slide a few more references to the movies into the game and let you know that the game has come to a viable stopping point.
The images of each Ghostbuster might be reminiscient of their appearances in the late 80's (the beauty of technology and it helps to show that the actors and actresses haven't missed a single step, despite the 20+ year lapse IRL since the last film) but Egon has been busy creating new modifications to the old Proton Accelerators. Aside from the traditional proton stream and the capture beam you now have the Boson Dart, an extremely powerful alterate fire mode for the proton stream. Then Egon added another method of energy shot to the pack: Dark Matter. You can now use its primary fire method, the Shot Blast, which acts like a shotgun and fires a spray that is devastating at close range; and the Statsis Stream, and order reversed beam of Dark Matter particles capable of immobilizing a ghost if it stays in the beam long enough. He also managed to reduce the size of the slime blower they used to save the day in their encounter with Vigo and now it's an integrated part of the pack. The negative slime is back and only the primary fire of the slime sprayer can neutronize it. The secondary fire is the Slime Tether. A sticky, elastic strand of slime is fired, one end at a time, from the gun. This can be used to tether parts of the environemnt together (a popular method of solving the puzzle presented to you in your journies). It can even be used occasionally to tether ghosts in place. Then there's the Meson Collider, the most powerful of your weapons. It's a stream of hyper-collided particles that is not only very powerful but is also very accurate at long range. It also marks the target you hit so that the secondary fire can track and hit it. It's a rapide fire version of the primary. These all have their uses and will prove invaluable in your coming work.
Busting ghosts is just what it should be. You have Corporeal entities and Ghost entities. Corporeal entities can be "dispersed". They are spirits that possess and, by virtue of this act, become bound to whatever they possess. If you destroy the possessed subject the spirit is freed and will never return. The ghosts have to be busted. Putting your targeting recticule on the ghost reveals a life meter which shows up as a circle around the site. When it gets to 1/4 remaining the ghost has been worn down enough that you can try to trap it. You press a button to throw the trap and then use the capture beam to steer the ghost to the trap. It opens on its own and then you just have to hold the ghost in the pull of the trap until it goes in. This feels like I always imagined it would. It's pretty well made though pulling with the capture stream is a little sluggish sometimes and not capable of finer movements. It's still pretty nice. While pulling the ghost in the capture screen you also begin building a "slam meter". When this meter begins to fill you can slam the ghost. It means a quick and sudden pull in one direction with the beam, designed to "slam" the ghost into the environment. It knocks them out and they can be more easily maneuvered to the trap. The original proton stream is the only one capable of controlling ghosts so you can trap them. The rest of the weapons at your disposal are only to damage the spirits so you can trap them.
For exploring you are given the PKE Meter and the Paragoggles. When you press the button to activate the PKE Meter the Paragoggles are activated as well. The PKE meter serves 3 purposes. It can track active spirits, find hidden ones, and track Cursed Artifacts for your collection. The lights on the PKE Meter and it's famous arms and the ticking, get higher as you near the target. The goggles have 3 nested circles in the middle. When a supernatural entity comes into view of the circles either one of the 3 circles will light up. This means that you can scan whatever you're targeting. These are the scans that are submitted to the Spirit Guide. You also "scan" the cursed artifacts to collect them. After you scan any of those things you can check them out in their respective places. The descriptions of them are as funny as a lot of the story and include things like a Swedish Deathclock which supposedly will predict the time of death for anyone near it, a toaster which was the nearest thing to a dying psychic and she projected her essence into it so it will now answer any question you ask of it, and the beard of a Russian exorcist who failed to notice a minor possessor demon took over his beard and after he died it left his face and stowed away on a freighter to the states. The PKE meter can sometimes be a little diffcult to use and will detect through most walls. In some later levels, artifact tracking in particular, can be difficult when it tracks through a door you can't open and you have to find a way around. It's not a massive issue but it is one of those "fly-in-the-ointment" annoyances that can really detract from a game if you encounter it too often. It's not that much of an issue so it's OK.
The ghost combat is fairly straight forward, as I've already explained, however it can often be a bit difficult and confusing. In keeping with the "spooky atmosphere" angle the game uses you often find yourself in poorly lit areas fighting glowing supernatural entities. However, a lot of ghosts in the fight will fade out and skip around the battlefield. This makes them more than a little difficult to track. Fortunately you spend a lot of the time fighting alongside your fellow Ghostbusters. They will periodically yell out things like "Aim high" or "To the right" and "watch your left". This helps until the later levels when the ectoplasm hits the fan, and the ghost fights get huge. This makes it more difficult to track the ghosts, especially in some of the more crowded environs. As long as you're not alone when your health reaches 0 you go down and a fellow Ghostbuster will come to your aid to revive you. You can also revive your fellow 'busters in combat. They can also revive eachother and they do seem to be pretty good about it. When you're alone (or if your fellow 'busters have gone down) then you fail the mission and have to restart from the last checkpoint. Most of the time these are close enough that you don't lose too much progress. The only issue I have is that the ghosts in larger fights don't go off of any type of threat scale. They just rotate through each available character and repeat. This means that at one point you're going to get freaking hammered and then they eventually let up. It gets annoying, especially if you're the one who has to accomplish a specific goal while the rest of them cover you. The ghost that can fade in and out are the worst. You wear them down to trap range and they fade and move and then you lose them in the tangle of others. The others will also pummel you if you are trapping one and they're up. These are the real issues that I have with this title.
Busting ghosts and scanning them into the Spirit Guide as well as collecting artifacts net you cash. This cash can be used to buy upgrades for your equipment. You can upgrade the power and efficiency of each weapon and things like the speed at which ghosts are pulled into the traps. You can also purchase an upgrade called "Slam Dunk Traps". If you can aim the "Slam" well enough during the capture phase of ghostbusting then you can slam the offending ghost onto the trap and it will instantly capture the ghost. It's very handy, especially in more intense fights when you want to lower the number of ghosts as quickly as possible. The money is a two way street. For every good thing you do there is a financial reward where as negative actions will penalize it. If you blast tables, chairs, or other destructable pieces of the environment you are assessed a bill for the damage you've done. At one point early in the story you are given an explanation as to why collateral damage isn't as big a problem as it should be. As liscenced and bonded contractors of the city the taxpayers pick up your bill. It does add a hint of replayability to the game to try and get through it and keep the bill for the damage below the amount of money you've made.
All in all this is a very entertaining video game despite being incredibly short. You can run through the story in less than 8 hours, easily. It's certainly something to pick up, especially if you're a huge fan of the franchise, like I am. I only took so long in playing this game because money was tight when this game came out and I finally found it in a "bargain bin" for $19.99. If you're a fan you'll delight in all the references to both films and even the references in the achievements.