Thankfully, It Isn't Mass Hysteria
Ghostbusters: The Video Game brings fans what they want; their own adventure with untested equipment. I blame myself.
Published: July 9, 2009
Multiplayer is really a mixed bag and a standard affair for most franchise titles. On the one hand, it is nice that you can finally play with your friends to hunt ghosts, destroy evil relics, or whatever game mode you fancy. However, this dead match (see what I did there?) style gameplay is riddled with flaws. The primary one being that you will experience lag. Since users and not a game server host these games, this should be expected. Nevertheless, when I’m hosting several players with reliable, strong connections, our ghost wrangling should not be spastically presented on screen. This can be fixed with a patch, but whether or not that will happen is unknown at this time. Another problem is that you cannot really communicate with your teammates unless you have a headset. While this isn’t the fault of Threewave Software (who actually worked on the multiplayer portion of this game), it is the common and unfortunate aspect of playing games over the PlayStation Network. My suggestion for multiplayer is this: play with your friends.
Beyond multiplayer, there are a few nice features in the game. Of note, any major checkpoint in the game can be revisited very easily, thanks to the way Terminal Reality set up the game. It really comes in handy if you want to relive a certain moment over again or hunt down something you missed previously. Speaking of which, there are a bunch of ghosts and relics to scan for Tobin’s Spirit Guide. The real incentive to fill out this bestiary is for quick cash (and a trophy or two), but for any Ghostbuster fan, you will really appreciate the experience of tracking and the blurbs about your finds. Lastly, the extras menu gives you a few short clips, ranging from a behind the scenes to (essentially) advertising for the first film’s Blu-ray release. Albeit with all that could have been included in terms of videos, none are all that new or original (sans resurrection of the Ecto-1), but it does help round out this media blitz of a game.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game is what fans have been waiting for all these years. The presentation might be flawed, and Bill Murray might sound flat at times, but the experience is still enjoyable. I have to question the strength of Terminal Reality’s engine for this game, as it has given us mixed results across platforms (the Xbox 360 having nicer proton damage effects and higher resolution textures, most noticeably) and really does not show the potential that other recent games have. The Force Unleashed is a title that really did a lot of great things when it came to environmental damage. Going a similar route would have been preferred, but I guess this game wasn’t intended to be as flexible. But at the end of the day, Ghostbusters isn’t about special effects, action, or large-scale destruction. It is about the comedy, and this script is pretty tight and a delight to experience.
