This month I shall be reviewing the Ghostbusters game for the Xbox 360. As a note I am a huge fan of the movies so some bias might seep into this review. Also thank you for patiently waiting for this review. Midterms wait for no one and I should have planned accordingly.
Concept: 5/5
Who didn’t grow up with, or watch, the Ghostbusters movies and think to themselves “I wish I could run around with a proton pack and do that stuff!” Honestly, I can’t think of a single person who has seen the movies and didn’t like them. Watching the ghostbusters running around New York City, getting slimed by slimer, or each other in the second movie, running from the librarian ghost, driving the statue of liberty, making the city a giant s’more
The ghostbusters have lurched from one amazing adventure and story to the next. If any of them ever have any grandkids they will have some amazing stories to tell. It just sparked the imagination and got everyone that watched it to feel like they were a little kid again. Of all the intellectual properties in the world that have been made into video games, the fact that they took so long to make the Ghostbusters video kind of makes you want to smack your head and say “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Graphics: 4/5
The graphics in this game are near perfect. They made everything beautiful but halt just short of trying to make the game look real. They knew they could walk into the uncanny valley and decided to stop just short. For those of you that don’t know, the uncanny valley is when computer graphics get so close to looking real that you notice that all the little things that make it look not real, such as lack of facial twitches and little nuances of the normal human beings.
The graphics of Ghostbusters goes all the way to the uncanny valley and rather than walk into it turn around and take the realistic models that they made for everything and make it slightly cartoony. So that you can easily tell who is who and everything but give it a feeling that it definitely is a video game and everything belongs here.
Unfortunately this amazing graphic style is hampered by one thing. They made everything colorful and beautiful. So when you look at one thing it is awesome looking, but when you put it all together it gets a little busy on the screen and you can’t always tell where certain things are. This is especially hard on the level after the librarian when you’re walking through the city and fighting gargoyles, construction worker ghosts, and other things.
Now I have to talk specifically about the proton pack. I have one great thing to say about it and one not so great thing to say about it. First the great thing, it looks AWESOME! Just absolutely perfect and when you change your firing mode, little doodads on the pack activate and deactivate so if you forget you can just look at the pack and know which mode you’re in. Unfortunately they also included your health bar and your overheat bar on the proton pack. Specifically on the side of the pack making it very small and very hard to see so you have to listen to the sounds of the game to know when you’re overheating and look to other visual feedback for when you’re hurt.
Sound: 3/5
I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the soundtrack and the sound in this game. Claiming that what works for a 2 hour movie doesn’t work for a 10 hour game. Which I can understand I guess, I mean if you’re a bit of an audiophile than I guess you’ll pick up on it and it’ll become annoying… but for the rest of us it works fine.
This game is the epitome of good sound. Good sound, not great sound, just good solid sound in a game is overlooked. It’s ignored. It does its job and doesn’t ask for anything in return. Everything sounds right and everything works properly. It’s like the sound wasn’t even programmed it just naturally happens. This is exactly what happens in Ghostbusters. Everything’s just… right. The only problem I had with the sound was Bill Murray’s performance.
Some people have said he just mailed the performance in and didn’t really try. But what I think it is is that he just isn’t sure how to voice act. It’s a different skill base than what is necessary for stage and screen acting and if you check imdb.com than you can see the only time Bill Murray’s voice acted other than the Ghostbusters video game is the Garfield movies, which from what I’ve been told are some of his worse movies.
Playability: 4/5
The gameplay of Ghostbusters is phenomenal. The controls handle great and once you get passed the lack of feedback for overheating and your health it plays near perfectly. They don’t give you all the abilities that the proton pack has, right from the get go. It seems common in most games these days that they just give you everything and let you go. But Ghostbusters harkens back to its time in the late 80s and 90s by using the unlocking abilities as you go system that was very prevalent back then.
Strangely enough this isn’t a problem. I don’t think the game would have suffered at all from just giving the player all of the abilities from the get go, but it doesn’t suffer from slowly making them available to the player one at a time. Shooting ghosts with the different beams from your proton pack is great. Especially when you’re using the normal proton stream and you wrangle yourself a ghost. After the first time the game asks you to capture multiple ghosts I relished in the nerdiness and said “Two in the box, ready to go, we be fast and they be slow!”
There is one glaring flaw with the gameplay though. There is no local multiplayer, which is just awkward. In this day and age it is just odd for a game to not have local multiplayer. Seeing as games have gone from only multiplayer and only singleplayer, to both, to both with online multiplayer as well, and then some only online multiplayer, it’s weird to see a game that’s singleplayer and online multiplayer. I actually felt a bit gypped. I had heard about all these cool multiplayer modes and I was looking forward to playing them with some of my friends. I can’t afford to pay for Xbox Live and I’m sure there are plenty of people that in the same position too.
Entertainment: 4/5
The story is really great. The developers masterfully use the main character, when he’s present. They strangely enough don’t always use him. There are times where every other character is present and talking to each other and planning stuff out and he’s not there. He’s not even in the background, which is all I would want. The main character never speaks but he should be present. He is part of the team after all it is very strange that he’s absent so much.
The ghostbusters are training this guy so why wouldn’t they want him around to learn from them? It’s just weird. But when he is there, it is amazing; he’s a fully developed character not just a random guy that you take control of at times. There are a few times in particular when they use him that I was so in awe that I now want to see them at least reference him in Ghostbusters III.
Also, in the movies and tv shows they were able to toy the line of funny and scary. So there were some definite situations that were just flat out creepy but never anything too nightmare inducing. They were able to do the same thing in the game. While there are plenty of times where I'm running around and smiling and enjoying myself. There were also times when I was sneaking about afraid to anger any nearby malevolent spirits. They did this masterfully just like in the movies.
X-Factor: 5/5
With everything else having been said, other than the local multiplayer I wouldn’t change a thing. Sure this game isn’t perfect and some things could be done to try and make it better. But honestly, there isn’t a perfect game on the planet.
The sense of coolness I got from just running around with the other ghostbusters and living out a childhood fantasy was too much fun to pass up. Even now I’m thinking back to my time spent in the game and thinking of the adventures I had with the team. How I feel like I was a part of it all and that, if I were a bit more delusional maybe, I’d be telling these stories as if they actually happened to my grandkids one day.
In the end it just captures your heart if you’re a fan of the movies.
Overall: 25/30 A Cut Above the Rest
