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Radioactive IT Review: Ghostbusters - more slime than substance
Radioactive IT Review: Ghostbusters - more slime than substance | Review: Ghostbusters - more slime than substance |
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| by Mike Bantick | ||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 13 July 2009 | ||||||||||||||||
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Firstly Harold Raimis and Dan Aykroyd not only reprise their on-screen roles, but also return to write the – for want of a better phrase – the screen-play to this video game. All this to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original cinematic. Along with Raimis and Aykroyd lending their likeness and voice acting to the project, Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson round out the original quartet of Ghostbusters, along with further film crossovers William Atherton (Walter Peck), Annie Potts (Janine) and Brian Doyle-Murray (Mayor Jock Mulligan). Joining the experienced team, you are a budding buster of ghost ass, and after a short tutorial wrangling of escaped protoplasm your proton back-packing buddy is thrust straight into a New York about to be overrun by undead. The aforementioned tutorial doesn’t give the young recruit too much confidence in ghost herding. The basic principle is to wear down a spirits corporeal essence to the point where it can be wrangled, like a Marlin being landed, into a trap. This is initially difficult to do, especially when it comes to judging the 3D spatiality of the hooked spook. Success, even with an experienced Ghostbuster assisting, can take a little practice. But eventually it clicks home, and you and your wise-cracking buddies will be landing all manner of purgatory stuck souls. Visually Ghostbusters is a treat; there is a bunch of mayhem happening on screen when a big battle is taking place. Beasties wildly whip around (the developer didn’t need to worry about clipping issues when dealing with the ethereal), along with much of the furniture or street level detritus depending on the level. Once the chaos has died down, the lads in the overalls can survey their handy-work. Usually this means charred walls, busted crockery, overturned vehicles and more. Great fun! So variety: There are four types of ammunition available to your proton pack, each with a dual shot capability. There is the classic proton energy stream, with explosive Boson dart. There is a dark matter projector that acts very much like a shotgun and a Meson Collider which amounts to the homing rocket launcher – albeit fast firing – of the arsenal. Then there is the flame-thrower of the weapons choice, the wonderfully fun, but short ranged slime blower that doubles as the puzzle solver gun as well. The slime tether is used during the handful of brain-teasers the game throws up. Shoot one end of the tether to the ground, shoot the other to a raised drawbridge, watch the tether contract and pull it down. It can also be used to delay rampaging hoards of approaching phantasms. But in essence they are very similar, though there is some strategy to flicking between the ammunition depending on .... ....which spook you might be up against. Whilst there are a wide variety of ghost models, there are, when it boils down, only really four types of enemies (not counting some environmental hazards) to go up against. Spirits need to be wrangled into the ghost traps, whilst minor ghouls or other more solid supernatural’s can simply be blasted to bits. Then there are minor and major boss creatures which are usually accompanied by one or more of the minor apparitions. Some enemies have ranged attacks, but all should be scanned by your PKE meter (more on that shortly) to give you an idea what you are facing and the best way to deal with it. Ghouls are more susceptible to the green slime, but you will need to switch to your proton pack to bring in a spirit, whilst tagging the giant graveyard thingy is best tackled with the quickfire Meson Collider. Rarely some beasties might need a combo approach.  CONTINUED on PAGE 2 |
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