The Ghostbusters are back, and they are better than ever. While most movie based video games have a large amount of suckage, Ghostbusters isn’t bogged down by the release date of a massive summer blockbuster.

This is an official entry in the franchise, a movie in video game form if you will. The boys in grey have a lot of fans both young and old, and all those fans can rest easily, as Ghostbusters: The Video Game delivers on many accounts.

The game kicks off as a wave of ghostly energy emanates from a museum housing a Gozer exhibit. At the same time the Ghostbusters have hired a new member to the team, the Rookie, who’ll be working as an “experimental weapons technician” or Egon’s guinea pig. The team is reluctant to get to know the new recruit as half the equipment he’ll be testing can send him flying halfway to New-Jersey in case something malfunctions.

No mention is made of the fact that the Proton Packs houses unlicensed nuclear accelerators. Hysteria ensues as Slimer breaks out of his containment unit and escapes to the Hotel Sedgewick, his original haunting ground. The opening sequence and subsequent tutorial level does a great job of propelling you into the action.

The story will take you to various New York locations such as Times Square for a showdown with Stay Puft, the NY Public Library, a parallel dimension and Central park. The locations are varied and offer different enemy types, albeit somewhat linear. Considering the fact that Ghostbusters is considered the third movie, a little linearity can be excused. Not to mention that the game is a lot of fun!

Finding the ghosts are one thing, but trapping them a whole other. Thankfully Egon has equipped you with a venerable arsenal of Proton Pack upgrades, with the Ghostbusters equivalents of a shotgun, freeze ray, rocket launcher and machine gun steadily being unlocked as you progress through the game. The slime blower from Ghostbusters 2 has been downsized and now fits neatly into your Proton Pack, letting you coat enemies and the environment in positively charged slime until everything looks like it just had a violent sneeze attack.

When you’ve successfully weakened a ghost, slap down a trap, wrangle the ghost above it and watch as it’s slowly being sucked towards its new home. All your equipment is upgradeable, even the traps themselves, one of which allows you to slam a ghost directly into a trap. The weapons also feature secondary fire modes, of which the slime tether is the most fun to play with. It’s your basic physics puzzle solver: connect two objects together and the slime tether pulls the two together. Using it on ghosts allows you to slam them into walls and the floor, even slamming them straight into traps.

Adding to the fun factor is the sheer amount of work and details that’s gone into the game. This is especially true of the Proton Packs, which are shown off in full graphical detail during the game’s loading screens. The various dings, hisses and whistles are taken directly from the original movie, even the hum of the Neutrona Wand as it powers up. As you switch between the various weapon modes, lights on the Proton Pack changes colour and extra features pop up to show off the love and care that’s been put into rendering the most awesome backpack ever.

Developer Terminal Reality have decided to completely forgo the regular HUD and uses the Proton Pack to show your remaining health and how close your pack is to overheating. You can take a lot of beatings, but it’s easy to forget to look at your health meter during the more intense moments of gameplay.

Overheating the Proton Pack can also become an issue, but the game offers a lot of feedback to remind players to vent it manually. The Pack begins to chug dangerously as a warning bell goes off. And if that isn’t enough to keep you on your toes, the controller vibrates like you’d expect an overheating nuclear accelerator would. It all makes for an engaging experience and gives you the feeling of not being downright unstoppable. Crossing the streams is still a bad idea, but due to some of Egon’s helpful modifications a total protonic reversal isn’t as bad as it used to be.

The game’s script, penned by the original film’s writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, deserves mentioning for being some of the funniest video game writing I’ve heard since playing Psychonauts. The humour is classic Ghostbusters and the script references various events from the previous two movies. It’s all tied neatly together in a story that continues the Ghostbusters mythos.

The original Ghostbusters themselves also return to voice their respective characters and they remain just as one remembers them; Venkman is still a sardonic ladies man; Egon is a giant nerd who hilariously delivers line after line of deadpan technobabble; Ray is the incurable optimist, even when faced with near death and Winston is the all-round regular dude. Rounding out the cast is Annie Potts as Janine Melnitz and William Atherton as Walter Dickless Peck.

The script well delivered on all fronts and the developer has gone to great lengths to recreate the look and of the original characters, even if they might come across as a bit too finely chiselled at times.

Thankfully the characters never venture far into the uncanny valley, with the animations being very lifelike, even in the in-game cut-scenes. It’s a common complaint in video games that cut-scenes boil down to a character speaking while the rest stand almost ramrod stiff waiting for their turn to speak. This doesn’t happen in Ghostbusters, as the characters actually behave rather human, reacting to other character’s movements and vocal taunts. This also trickles into gameplay, like the time when I accidentally slimed Egon and he took two steps back with a look of disgust on his face.

But then there’s the Rookie, who has the most generic face I’ve ever seen in a game. I often found myself mistaking him with both Ray and Venkman when I saw him in the cut-scenes. Add to the fact that he’s a nameless and silent protagonist his character doesn’t really come off as anything but filler. However what we’re really here is to experience what it’s like to actually be a Ghostbuster, something the game pulls off beautifully.

Like most modern games there’s also a hefty online multiplayer portion to the game, but no co-op mode. If offline, story based co-op is your thing, the Wii or PS2 versions might be the way to go.

The online multiplayer is completely separate from the story, but continues the game’s initial promise of making you feel what it’s like to be a Ghostbuster. You get to choose from different types of campaign modes consisting of three missions. They all revolve around trapping ghosts and destroying other enemies, and are unique in that they emphasise both teamwork and competition.

While you’re fighting to survive you’re also fighting to nab the most ghosts and earn the most money. Survival, Protection and Containment all feel somewhat similar, albeit with different objectives. What really shines is the Slime Dunk, where players are tasked with capturing as many Slimer ghosts as possible. It’s especially fun to fire upon your opponents with your Proton Stream, putting them out of play for a few minutes so you can steal his ghost.

Ghostbuster does a lot of things right, both for fans of the original films and for gamers looking for a good time. The script is well written, the voice cast is brilliant and the gameplay offers a lot of fun and variety to be had.

Unfortunately the game isn’t very long, clocking in some place around 6 hours. Someone I spoke to during the online multiplayer claimed to have sped through the game in under 4 hours. Finding all the cursed artefacts and hidden achievements might stretch the total game time to somewhere between 8 or even 10 hours, depending on how often you die or run into a snag. There are also some strange difficulty spikes where cursing will ensue, especially on the harder difficulty settings.

If you’re looking for a fun, engaging and sometimes downright silly experience, Ghostbusters: The Video Game is for you. Busting will make you feel good.

- 8 / 10