Ghostbusters: The Video Game Preview

I haven’t been much of a Ghostbusters fan, partly because I was too young when it was all that and partly because it’s a bit too sugar coated for my tastes. When I think ghosts and supernatural stuff, I’m thinking Evil Dead, Event Horizon and twisted stuff like that. Either way, I never give up a chance to preview a game so when I heard Milestone had near finished code of this movie adaptation I stepped up to spend some time with their build.

My first impression of the game was "OMG, is this a current-gen game?" It looks terrible and there’s no sugar coating that fact. Sure the environmental destruction’s kinda cool but it doesn’t hold a candle to the stuff we’ve seen in Red Faction Guerilla. Textures are low res, character models are bad and New York city looks appalling. Still if the gameplay’s tight, I’m willing to look past all the flashy stuff since I’m not thaaaaaat superficial.

And from what I played the game did look like fun. You step into the boots of a newcomer with the Ghostbusters squad. Now you don’t have a name; you’re just the new guy and I told that this was a conscious decision made by the developers so you could watch the original Ghostbusters - Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson and Harold Ramis deliver their lines with much aplomb.

Since you are a Ghostbuster you’re pretty much gonna spend your time eradicating ghosts from the Big Apple AKA New York City. To do so you’re equipped with a Proton pack that doubles as your HUD as well. You catch ghosts using the Ghostbusters’ Golden rule of trapping ghosts: Zap ‘em, Cap ‘em and Trap ‘em. What this basically means is that at first you’ll have to stun a ghost with your proton beam and once it’s dazed you can hold onto it with your proton lasso. Once the ghost is caught in your proton lasso you can slam it around the room for a while after which you can trap it for good with your ghost trap.

It’s a pretty entertaining game mechanic; the only thing is if they expect us to catch all the ghosts in the game in the same way, we’re looking at a pretty monotonous game.

Either way we’ll get to know how things play out as we’ll be receiving our review copy real soon.