Ghostbusters The Video Game Preview

Thankfully, Egon has brown hair. No blonde shredded-wheat head here...

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who like Ghostbusters, and those who have never seen the films. All right, that's possibly a minor exaggeration, yet the fact the remains that Peter Venkman and co represent an enormous license, one beloved to a great many people. The masses want the forthcoming Ghostbusters games to live up to this legacy, and we're no exception. Both games were looking pretty good at Atari's big expo last year, so I was pretty keen to get myself along to the dedicated Ghosties preview event that took place last week - and not just because I wanted a free T-shirt, either.

Rather than going over the few details we know of the plot (get the skinny from our previous preview), I thought it might be best to just jump straight into what the game is actually like to play. The Xbox 360 demo stage on offer last week saw the un-named player character accompanying Ray Stantz through an abandoned office block. The reason for the lack of office workers soon became clear, as it transpired the iconic marshmallow giant, Mr Stay Puft (more on why he's in the game later), was mooching around outside. That wasn't the only problem, as Monsieur Puft was also spawning hundreds of vicious little marshmallow dog creatures that seemed hell-bent on biting your legs off.

Despite this impending threat, my more immediate concern was to test out Terminal Reality's destruction engine. The developer has promised that the game will accurately portray the Ghostbusters' flair for causing mass destruction everywhere they go, and it certainly seems that this is the case. Pretty much everything in the game-world can be trashed with a casual proton blast: tablecloths evaporate, furniture explodes and glass shatters. The cost of the damage you cause is neatly recorded via a pop-up indicator, and all the destruction effects are permanent: I spent a few happy minutes burning smiley faces onto a wall. Aiming is mapped to the right analogue stick, your movement is mapped to the left, and shooting is naturally mapped to the right trigger. There's no ammo to pick-up or expend, but firing for too long causes your gun to overheat. Like everything else in the game, your temperature is indicated via lights on your character's proton pack. Get too hot and you'll have to discharge the pressure by pressing RB.

Moving and shooting your 'buster feels much like your standard third person shooter. I was slightly disappointed by the lack of controller vibration while firing off the pack, but other than that it certainly looks and feels the part. Ray Stanz also looks pretty close to the real-life Dan Akroyd (or at least to what he looked like in the '80s), and thanks to the full co-operation of the main cast he sounds like him too. Indeed, it's already clear that all the talk of a 480 page script was no exaggeration: there's barely a minute that goes by without someone saying something, and it's often pretty funny.

"Why worry? Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back."

In the demo, Ray's banter subtly guided us to our next objective - a large and apparently vacant office. At Mr Stanz's behest, we then got out our PKE meter and used it to scan the room in search of paranormal activity. Here the game switches to a first-person view, with a combination of coloured lights and weird antenna things helping you to move closer to the ghostly source. Sure enough, I soon found myself staring up at a glass skylight - and a whole pack of vicious marshmallows came crashing through seconds later. While they disintegrated quickly under a proton beam, the sheer number of killer mallows made them a fairly serious problem. Indeed, it took me a few attempts to get past this section, and I only succeeded after someone showed me that the proton pack has an alternate fire that sends out a single, grenade-like blast.

Once the mallows were toasted, we pushed on through the building. Mr Stay Puft made a brief appearance in an area where the outside wall had completely crumbled away. Here you and Ray will have to defend a cowering civilian from the giant's grasping, mallow-y fist. A single alternate-fire blast was enough to drive him off, but I noticed with satisfaction that Stay Puft's flesh became blackened and toasted under the heat of the proton fire. After, Ray and Peter entered into a bit of dialogue over walkie-talkie, with Venkman complaining about the high calorific content of the little marshmallow beasties. Then it was on up to the rooftops, where we got to engage in some proper ghostbusting.

While some of the phantoms you'll face in Ghostbusters will simply be destroyed, many will have to be caught using the well-known trapping method. When you encounter a new ghost for the first time, you'll have to scan them using the PKE meter to determine how they must be handled; doing this also grants you a damage bonus against the spectre in question. Catching the roof top spooks was a case of blasting them with the proton pack until their resistance wore down. At this point you lock on to them with a capture beam and gain the ability to drag them around; you can also use the trigger buttons to slam them against the ground. Once you've dragged a ghost into position above an open trap, you'll have to help wrestle them down into the trap. Job done!