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Atari come frustratingly close to making a good game out of this licensed tittle.
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Penned by the same writer's as the original film (Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd) the game has lots of laughs that will take you straight back to the original film in the 80's. They are joined by Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson from the original line up. As a Ghostbuster's fan you will love it all the elements that made the film so good are back the jokes the characters the car!. As a gamer you may be a little dissapointed.
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It is set in New York in locations such as libraries, cemeteries, museums, central Park and even other dimensions. You take the role of a apprentice ghostbuster who has just signed up you are joined by any number of the other ghostbusters from time to time as you work your way through the game. You also come up against many of the ghosts from the movies most noticeably Slimmer and the Stay puff marshmallow man.
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To catch the ghosts you are equipped with a proton pack which has 4 different settings the first is your standard proton stream or it can shoot a short dart known as a Boson Dart these weaken the ghost, you can then switch to a capture beam that Lassoo's them so you can throw your trap to snare them. The 3 other features include a freezing stream that will slow down or freeze enemies totally and allows you to blast them ( ala shotgun style), the Meson collider which shoots short bursts but can be locked onto a target with a homing tag. Lastly then the slime feature slime is quite a useful product it will kill enemies and close portals as well as clean up black slime that is toxic to you. |
Different weapons have different effects on different enemies but to help you out you can scan the ghosts to add them to your database which will tell you which weapon is most effective and their attacks and the battles are for the most parts lots of fun.
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But some are just way too frustrating at times, you cant take many hits before you are downed and it can be quite difficult to see where the ghosts are coming from if they are above you so if you get any that prefer a dive bomb attack you can be killed pretty quickly and there is very little you can do about it. As long as your not the last ghostbuster standing there is a chance to be revived this has both pluses and minuses it is better than using checkpoints all the time but so much of your game is spent running and reviving the other ghostbusters it gets annoying quite quickly especially in the more difficult battles when you are trying to bring down a ghost and your buddy keeps getting injured. |
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This brings me to the checkpoint issue all most every large battle involves a certain action to initiate it for example run to the end of a corridor or scan a spooky gate enter a door etc, when you are at a paticularly difficult part of the game you will die quite a few times, running down the same path and scanning the same gate 20 times saps the joy out of the game no matter how good the jokes are. It would be so easy to re spawn at the start of the battle not 10 seconds back, i cant understand why developers do this. Add to that the utterly unacceptable loading times of over 30 seconds between getting killed and re spawning is just way too much for a game that isn't that massive and has also been installed to your hard drive to cut down loading time ( what they heck would they be like without the install).
The problems with the Ps3 version not looking as good as the xbox version has been well documented and probably explains the "timed exclusive EU release" Sony went for. Which sets a bad example for future timed releases. It will be in the back of gamers minds that deals like this may be covering up flaws with the game.
To sum up its so close to a great game, its a bit disappointing they didn't go the whole hog and this could have been as good as the movie. It is really well written and for the most part it is a well built game with plenty of action and colour filling the screen. It really is a lot of fun while your playing it is just let down by the frustrating items listed above. Once finished which should only take about 7 hours there isn't much replay value and the multi-player feature again is fun but at the same time just not enough to keep you playing for a long time.
SCORE 82% |