Egon was the best, he was the Velma of the Ghostbusters, the spectacled one who did all the real work

Sometimes it’s hard to know where or how something went wrong, or to precisely put your finger on what’s actually wrong. Ghostbusters has gone wrong and I don’t know how and I’m scared. We’ve got the original cast providing all their voices, we’ve got a script by the original writers (and yes I know they’re the cast as well), we’ve got a story that even ties into the original film and we’ve got gameplay pilfered from all the ‘what’s hot games’ of the last twelve months. I should be trumpeting this song from the rafters, for four years in a row I went out for Halloween dressed as a Ghostbuster in a carefully hand crafted outfit, I had the theme song on loop on an eight track tape and drove my parents to almost mental ruin playing it constantly. I even liked Ghostbusters 2 the first time I saw it and worshipped at the altar of the cartoon show every weekday at 4. But this game rubs me all kinds of wrong ways.

Back you big poorly rendered thing

The game sets you up as the silent new recruit brought in to assist the Ghostbusters and use their new untested equipment. After a short tutorial mission in the fire stations basement iconic green phantom Slimer escapes and heads back to his old haunting ground at the Sedgewick Hotel and the team chases after him. This is quickly followed by a battle with the Stay Puft Marshmallow man and then the Grey Lady from the New York Public Library. In fact you manage to get through all the important encounters of the original film in the games first hour. This is clearly done for fan service but its handled pretty awkwardly, it feels more like the game going through the required motions to get them out of the way before diving into the new plot.

They look good now, but wait till they start moving, and worse, talking

As for that plot well... apparently Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the plot for this game. Now here’s what I think really happened. Ghostbusters makes an ass load of money and Ramis and Aykroyd throw down some plot points and a rough treatment for a sequel. They subsequently lose these notes and bash out something rubbish for the film sequel. Then many, many years later they get approached about a flashy next gen video game about the same time the notes turn up during a garage sale. So this bare bones treatment is roughly turned into a script with little addition in the way of pacing or dialogue. They turn it over to the game developers who no doubt fawn and gush like Japanese school girls at a Justin Timberlake concert because it's bloody Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis! Who wouldn't fawn, hell I'm getting hot flashes just thinking about meeting them. So they go with the rough treatment as a script without putting any more work into it.

Trapping ghosts with friends can have some fun moments

The dialogue is just really, really lacking in terms of humour and there are no memorable moments or lines of the type you’d expect. Remember the twinky speech? Or how about Sigourney Weaver in a tiny dress asking ‘are you the keymaster?’ (Oh how I remember that in my formative young years) Well don’t expect anything of comedy value in the game. It’s just not there. The actors themselves sound bored and half asleep for most of the game as well and Bill Murray, it pains me to say, sounds like he literally phoned it in, like with a real phone.

The gameplay is surprisingly fun for around the first two hours. You get a proton pack and a trap and you have to lasso and wrangle ghosts and drag them down into the trap, just like in the movie. It’s really quite exciting the first few times. Then you realise that’s the whole game and you’re just going to do it over and over for the next five hours it suddenly seems a lot less fun. There are only really three types of enemies in the game. The actual ghosts which fly and can move through walls, the more common enemies that just die when you blast them and the larger enemies that are made up of possessed materials (like a big enemy made of books) who take a few more blasts to down. That’s it, while you might encounter these enemies in a variety of skins that’s all of them that you will encounter. There are also a few very brief moments where you use your proton pack or your slime gun to move objects around... yeah, it's pretty basic, if you've played any video game since Half Life you've encountered similar puzzles before, only usually smarter.

Statues don't do that normally right? Not even Turner Award Winners

I’d also highly recommend you play the game through on casual first as the harder difficulties can be hideously annoying. In later levels you will encounter some pretty aggressive ghosts and its often just dumb luck that you manage to trap a ghost before their mate smacks you in the back mid capture and you have to start the process again. You’ve always got at least one Ghostbuster watching your back, except for one brief part of the game, but their proton beams just serve to confuse the combat rather than actually helping most of the time. The proton beams are pretty wild and when there are three of them licking around the place it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going on. If someone gets injured they can be revived Gears of War style but it happens so often your usually better letting your AI mates heal each other or wait until the fight is over rather than breaking of a capture and going for a rescue.

As for the visual appeal of the game, well it certainly looks like the Ghostbusters of the 80’s and the Firehouse headquarters has been very well recreated. You’re even given the option of running around the HQ between missions and looking at everything, although apart from a few measly and dull interaction animations there’s nothing to do. The Ghostbusters themselves look like the actors as they appeared twenty years ago, right until they start moving. You may recall the hideous wax people from Spiderman 3, they still give me nightmares, well Ghostbuster is just a level above that with its jerky uncoordinated characters and laughable lip syncing.

The PK bits, like the actual ghost busting, start of novel but quickly nose dive into repetitively annoying

There’s a multiplayer option as well for online coop across a series of online missions. It’s basically a bunch of challenges in levels based on the story mission levels for you and a few friends to catch ghosts and earn cash. But its very vanilla and the lack of split screen is a shame.

The complete package is really disappointing and seems to almost demand of the player a degree of heartfelt nostalgia to buoy you through the experience. Well I can tell you that I had that nostalgia in spadesm absolute spades, and it wasn’t enough to keep me interested. The only reason I finished the game was because the end surprised me, lacking any real climax I thought it was just another boss battle. The game is certainly fun for a few hours but it runs a few hours too long and isn’t better than recent movie tie ins like Wanted: Weapons of Fate and Terminator Salvation. It just goes to show that you can have all the players involved in an adaptation and still fail to capture the charm and the attraction of the source material. If you want my advice save yourself half your money and buy the Ghostbusters Bluray. It’s funnier and you’ll have a far better time watching it than you’d ever have playing it. But heck, if you're a die hard Ghostbusters fan like me you've probably played this all ready by now.