Don't cross the streams

I'd been meaning to pick up a copy of Ghostbusters: The Video Game for quite some time, but had never quite got round to it – until I noticed it as part of Steam's recent 5-day long 1-day only spectacular sale, where at £7.50 it would have been rude not to buy it. So I did, and three days later I'd completed it. Finishing a game at all is an incredibly rare occurrence for me, never mind within a few days of buying it, so I just thought I should mention that and perhaps attempt to explain why.

Just to be clear, this won't be a review – partly because I don't do those here, but mostly because there are at least five thousand of those already. Google is your friend if you want a proper review. With that out of the way, here are some thoughts.

The game is incredibly short, which is bad. It's also a time vampire – the other night I fired up the game for a quick blast at around 1am, only to finish the game and discover it was somehow 6am. So perhaps the game is actually really long and I just didn't notice. Nope, I've checked Steam and I've only had the game open ten hours, and I'm pretty sure a couple of hours of that can be accounted for as time spent with the game on pause while having a smoke. It's a short game, then.

The cutscenes are really janky. The quality is terrible, the aspect ratio is wrong on my 16:9 (the same dimensions as the first two Ghostbusters films) monitor, the picture is grainy and the character rendering looks worse than in the game. A pre-rendered FMV should not be lower quality than my graphics card could render in-game, and if it is you've done it wrong. Which is a shame because the story told by the cutscenes is quite a good one and the voice acting is every bit as brilliant as you'd expect from the cast of the films.

The biggest downside for me is the lack of multiplayer on the PC version – perhaps I've been spoiled by Left 4 Dead, or perhaps it's the incapable AI, but whenever I was fighting a ghost with the rest of the gang, I kept thinking how this would be ten times better if only I could call in a couple of human-controlled friends to cover my back or help me with a containment stream. I'm quite accustomed to PC games missing out on something from their console counterparts, but this is a shocking omission I can see no good reason for.

But then there's the actual gameplay. Oh, joy of joys, the gameplay. It's excellent. The puzzle-solving is good and, amazingly, not out of place, the other ghostbusters' AI is tolerable if sometimes frustrating – but I like that if you stand still or start dicking around, they get out their PKE meters and do a sweep, or something else that fits their character – and the weapons, which basically comprise the proton pack with a few additional upgrades gradually granted throughout, are great fun and well balanced. The RPG-esque elements of finding collectable artefacts with your PKE meter & goggles and being able to upgrade your equipment with money earned catching ghosts are a nice touch too.

Catching ghosts then. The reason I wanted to buy the game in the first place. It's really hard to put into words exactly how awesome this is. I'll say it like this – pretty much every other game I own, once you strip away the plot, cutscenes, voice acting, weapons, vehicles etc, essentially boil down to go-here-and-shoot-this-until-it-dies. Never much challenge in the actual shooting department. But in this there honestly is – the feeling I get once I've worn down a ghost, managed to catch and keep it in a containment stream and guide it into the trap, is a feeling of actual achievement, one borne out by the damage I've doubtless caused my keyboard and mouse mashing them far harder than usual trying to get this bloody ghost in the trap. It's exhilarating in a way no other game experience has been for me, and that's what kept me coming back to the game for a little more.



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