Unless your a Light Gun fanatic and of Ghostbusters, do yourself a favor and bust this game down to the containment unit
Platform: PSOne
Developer: Similis , Sproing Interactive Media
Publisher: LSP
Genre: Light Gun Shooter
Age Rating: 3+ PEGI
Release Date: March 2004
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Score: 2.5/10
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summery:
Unless your a Light Gun fanatic and of Ghostbusters, do yourself a favor and bust this game down to the containment unit.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To fans who actually spent time watching Extreme Ghostbusters on Television which was a follow up to the original featuring a cast of different characters. It ended up not being as good as the original series but was still okay. With a few different games which are based on the show of the same name many of the them were just down right terrible bad back then. Perhaps the same story could be said for LSP's next game in the series called Extreme Ghostbusters The Ultimate Invasion for the PSOne. Being perhaps the last light gun for the system it certainly disappoints on any level whatever or not your a fan of the series.
The ultimate invasion is more or less a mere clone of Time Crisis, borrowing it's Gameplay style with different Minigames added in. The Training mode puts you or a second player to chose from either simple shooting ranges to shoot all the targets in the time limit, preventing ghosts from escaping from the ghost trap or shoot away at incoming slime-balls to avoid getting hit. These Minigames can get harder by each round by going faster and lesser time that you need to progress to the next round, this can sometimes add a bit of frustration on completing the Minigame. The Minigames seem fun for at least 10 minutes for the most part they don't really add much value to the game.
The game's main Adventure Mode is where you go through 9 different levels blasting ghosts. The game can be played on 3 difficulty settings to make the game harder or easier. Quick game allows you to play any of the 9 levels you unlocked through the Adventure Mode.
The game's storyline doesn't really make a whole lot of sense and it features some really awful writing and dialogue and misleads which will certainly confuse many fans of the show. It doesn't help it uses animated cutscenes from the show and you'll be confused that many of them don't necessary follow the storyline of the game at all which makes the cutscenes almost pointless. At least the game has no voice work cause you'd never imagine how awful the dialogue would be.
Adventure Mode is easy and straight forward for the most part but you in order to successfully complete a level you'll need to accomplish a certain amount of points in order to advance which is pointless and makes the game more ridiculous. Another thing which can get annoying is that when you run out of time you have to restart the level and that takes away a life you have. Since Time Crisis 2 you'd never need to restart a level after running out of time you'd just lose a life and continue playing. The game's difficulty only gets harder when you reach the third and final segment of the game. The Adventure Mode only takes about nearly over an hour and 30 minutes to complete but later on you'll most likely get bored of it after beating a few levels and that would be a good thing as it's Gameplay gets boring and repetitive really quickly.
All throughout the game you shoot little pink Slimer ghosts, Zombies and two villains from the cartoon series but the Leprechaun appearing all over the game makes no sense. Since when did the Leprechaun make clones of himself? The game supports the use of either an Analog Controller or Namco's G-Con 45 light gun to make the game easier. You can edit the cursor's sensitivity if you're using the controller but however though you can't change the controls or change to reload action to release so you'll need to get used to the press to duck gimmick.
In the game you simply shoot down any ghosts that appear on the screen and also pressing and holding down the duck to take cover and reload. You shoot ghosts for a minute till then you advance to the next cover spot. When playing the 2 Player game you can allow either one player to reload or allow both players to reload. Your proton gun has 2 different shot attacks which is convenient. You have a simple standard shot and your alternate shot is a proton stream which kills mostly any ghost on screen with one shot with a press of another fire button. You'll mostly relay with standard shots because the proton stream is slower and doesn't kill every enemy in 1 hit. Boss battles are long and tedious but luckily it's probably the only time where the proton stream comes into play because relaying on shots take forever to damage them costing you a life. The games main problem is sometimes the game defies conventional hit detection, mainly because sometimes you'll shoot a ghost that is under a pipe and you can't shoot him because some sort of invisible barrier is blocking your shots which is really annoying. Also you'll miss an open target when there was another ghost that was already been shot and it didn't disappear from the screen which can be a pain. The same can also be said for the last boss battle which where the problem comes into play where you can't shoot around a blocked wall when the bullets are nowhere near the wall. Extreme Ghostbusters The Ultimate Invasion's Gameplay is just too simple and formulaic to any gamer who is familiar with Time Crisis and to anyone else would be better off with it.
The Ultimate Invasion suffers with lifeless environments with no civilians around and graphical details that look terrible. The games sprites look badly pixelated and looks even worse when up-close as well as bad animations that makes onscreen enemies look more like puppets. The music is unappealing and the sound effects besides BKE meter which sounds like what it sound in the show, every other sound is annoying and terrible.
This game has no Ghostbusting business that you would want to have here. It's boring Gameplay, badly written story and graphics that makes the game look completely lifeless and unappealing. If you ever see this game this strange in your neighborhood do yourself a favor and simply call the real Ghostbusters or Unless your a Light Gun fanatic and of Ghostbusters, do yourself a favor and bust this game down to the containment unit.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pros:
1. At least it has some minigames that's worthwhile for 10 minutes.
The Bads:
1. Terrible graphics and animations.
2. Some storyline sequences doesn't make any sense.
3. Gameplay modes gets boring and repetitive.
4. Sometimes the game defies conventional Hit detection.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (BlaZer91)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------