Twelve years ago Terminal Reality still existed as a game development company and were probably best known for their BloodRayne franchise. It was still a few years before Kinect Star Wars and The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct would become the final nails in their coffin, but even then they weren’t known to make good games. Often curious titles with some neat ideas, yes. But not what you’d call “good”. And Ghostbusters: The Video Game, originally released in 2009, wasn’t “good” either. But it wasn’t terrible and had some cool things about it. The Remastered version of the game doesn’t get better.
To start off, I need to mention that the possibly most notable part of Ghostbusters: The Video Game is the fact, that the story of the game is based around an unproduced script for a sequel to the original two Ghostbusters movies. That, and the fact that most of the original cast returned as voice actors and all, apart from Bill Murray who’s clearly there for the paycheck and nothing else, sound excited to be part of the story. This, given that the original movie still holds up as a fantastic mix of comedy, sci-fi and horror, should inspire confidence, but just as the sequel film, it’s very hard to justify this game’s story existence. In many ways, it is a repeat of the same story bits and locations from the original movies, but in a less interesting way and with far fewer jokes landing.
Same goes for the gameplay, which works as a very primitive third person shooter from the era (except with no cover). Granted, shooting the proton pack and slime is exciting and both of these tools are actually fun to use for both combat and puzzle solving. But on practice they eventually become far less useful in comparison with basically a machine gun and a shotgun, which work as one would expect. Mostly because of how enemies rather quickly get switched from ghosts you need to trap to just hordes of fodder you shoot. There’s no nuance to the shooting, most locations are terrible gameplay-wise, mechanic of buying upgrades feels slapped on and most of the optional stuff is more often just a bother to do and isn’t worth it.
Which is a shame, since there are cool ideas here. Visually the game wasn’t fantastic even for 2009, but the locations had style. Some of the sequences and gimmicks to the locations, ghosts and tools are genuinely inventive and fun. And a lot of the geeky speudo-scientific elements are, just like in the movies, really intriguing. When everything comes together, – the mechanics, the jokes, the situations, – the game is a blast. But Tron 2.0 this is not, as most of the time Ghostbusters: The Video Game is mediocre and sometimes it’s outright frustrating. Remastered edition, actually, doesn’t help much, if any. Settings resetting every launch of the game, awkward sound and music cuts everywhere, weird interface bugs… It’s not very good.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game, original or Remastered, isn’t a terrible game. It has some curious things and can be interesting. But it’s not good either and it never was. If you’re a die-hard fan of the franchise, you probably played it back when it got released originally. Otherwise, I can’t really recommend playing it.