GHOSTBUSTERS
Won’t make you feel good
RELEASED OUT NOW! Reviewed on Ps4
Also on XO, PC Publisher activision
It was once accepted wisdom among gamers that movie tie-ins were almost always terrible. But in recent years, the reputation of licensed games has recovered somewhat.
The Ghostbusters videogame, however, represents a return to the bad old days. While its central twin-stick shooting gameplay might be best described as flavourless but functional, this workaday core is dragged down by shoddy, threadbare presentation.
Your four-person spook squad is dispatched to a stage with a mandate to purge the paranormal. In practice, this means shooting lightweight projectiles at swarms of palette-swapped spectres, as you battle through each overlong level. Occasionally, you’ll have to whip out your Proton Pack to dispatch an especially fierce phantom.
This gameplay loop – which often repeats dozens of times within a single, interminable stage – never proves especially thrilling nor remotely funny. In fact, the grenade-spamming, circle-strafing action is so basic and untaxing that we were left with enough unoccupied grey matter to dwell on the disappointment generated by a game that so singularly fails to reproduce the spirit of its source material.
The first Ghostbusters game, in 1984, was made in six weeks by adapting a part-developed game called Car Wars.