Ghostbusters The Video Game Hands-on Preview

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.

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!

Wrangling and slamming the ghosts about is a lot of fun, and it seems that physics-related japery will make up a significant proportion of the action in the game. Along with the demo, Terminal Reality also showed off a video featuring other elements and spectres. Of the busting-equipment on display, it was the slime-tether that once again caught my interest – a sort of ectoplasmic successor to Half Life 2’s gravity gun. The idea seems to be that you fire one end at an object or surface, fire the other at something else, then sit back and watch as the two are brought together via the elastic properties of the slime. If this weapon is as much fun to use as it is to watch, it’ll be great. Elsewhere I was also pretty impressed with the game’s gollums – large enemies that are organically formed out of dozens of independent objects. Imagine being in a library and coming face-to-face with a walking mass of hardback novels, and you’ll get the idea. I’m not sure that I’ve seen anything like these collective enemies before. To defeat them, you have to find the one object inside them that is acting as a kind of nucleus; by tugging it away from the rest of the creature you’ll send everything crashing to the floor in a heap. It’s a neat idea, and it looks brilliant.

Sadly there were no gollums to fight during the Xbox hands-on, nor did we get to directly battle the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, since the demo ended just before what looked to be an epic encounter. However, we did get to check out the Wii game’s depiction of the Ghosties’ rumble with the big sailor. As you may remember, the Wii is actually getting a separate game, courtesy of Red Fly Studios, rather than a simple port of the 360/PS3 experience. However, both games use the same script and dialogue – so the story is more or less identical. Incidentally, the developer insists that the plot reveals a solid reason for the sudden re-appearance of Stay Puft and all the other iconic ghosts from the franchise; it’s not just fan-service. We’ll have to wait until the plot is properly revealed to see how everything is explained, but we doubt that few fans are that bothered. This is a Ghostbusters game, after all. Who wouldn’t want to fight Stay Puft?

In the Wii confrontation, the player is hanging over the side of a building, attached to a rope being held by the other Ghostbusters off-screen. In actual fact there may be two of you in this precarious situation, since the Wii game is capable of supporting two players at once. Either way, you’ll find yourself staring down the side of a very tall office block, with a giant pissed-off Marshmallow attempting to climb up and get you. Every so often he’ll throw chunks of building at you that have to be blasted or avoided; the rest of the time you’ll be busy unloading your proton pack into the giant’s face. It’s fairly epic stuff as far as boss battles go, what with the vertigo-inducing perspective, all the helicopters buzzing around and lots of daft comments as Peter Venkman begins to lose his grip on your rope. Stay Puft himself looks great too; his character is already a perfect match for the Wii game’s cartoon style, and the model Red Fly has created is looking really quite cool.

I didn’t get to spend a long time with the Wii version, but it seems that Red Fly has been working to refine the combat mechanics. If you read the last preview, you’ll know that capturing ghosts relies upon a multi-step process of blasting the ghosts, creating a capture cage, dragging the phantom around and then finally throwing out a trap. This has now been tweaked and refined slightly, to the extent that that capture cages now form automatically once you’ve blasted a ghost for long enough – there’s no more shaking the nunchuck. This seems like a prudent move, since last time around it seemed that there was a little too much to remember. Since you’re now left with a fairly simple procedure of shooting, dragging and then trapping (by bowling the nunchuck and hitting Z), it’s easier to remember what you’re supposed to be doing. By reducing the complexity a notch, Red Fly has made the ghost-catching a lot easier to pick up.

While there are certainly going to be some similarities between the two games, both Red Fly and Terminal Reality were keen to show off their unique attributes. In addition to having two-player co-op, the Wii version will also feature collectibles that can be gathered by scanning ghosts – including background info on the spectres and original concept art. Redfly’s game also features a few phantoms not found in the PS3 and 360 iteration. Among of the coolest of these were a series of haunted arcade machines that spit out ghostly sprites – for some reason, this reminded me of Jeff Minter’s old shooters.

Meanwhile Terminal Reality released a few more details of their multiplayer mode. While there’s no full campaign co-op, groups of up to four players will be able to go out on jobs together, in a rough approximation of the montage sequence from the first film. If the single-player campaign is the central story, this is essentially the day-to-day busting that the team gets up to in-between chapters. In gameplay terms, what this means is that you’ll be able to take control of one of the four busters (or the un-named hero from the campaign) as you engage in one of six job types: “Survival” is fairly self-explanatory, while “Containment” simply asks you to catch all the ghosts on the map; “Thief” sees you retrieving items stolen by spectres; “Protection” has you defending a precious piece of Egon’s equipment; “Destruction” requires you to completely trash all the items on a map; and finally there’s “Slime Dunk” – which sees players competing to capture the most Slimers.

There will be a total of 12 maps for playing around with these modes, and there’ll be a few minor gameplay changes to keep things competitive. Players will have to pick up ammo, while your ghostly opponents will have new AI behaviours – including the ability to merge with other spooks. Needless to say, there’ll also be an online ranking system. It all sounds pretty interesting, and I’m looking forward to giving it a spin. Ghostbusters fans have been waiting a long time for a video game worthy of the licence; now, with any luck, it looks like we may actually get two – and a re-release of the film, to boot. Now if only someone would confirm those rumours of a Judd Apatow-produced sequel…

Ghostbusters: The Game will be out on Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii on June 19.