The Haunted Hoard: Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime (PS3)

With Ghostbusters: The Video Game, Atari created not only one of the most faithful and enjoyable video game adaptations of the ghost-hunting film series, but it managed to do so to such a degree it became considered an unofficial third entry for fans of the franchise who lamented that the original cast never came together for another film. However, after that game’s success, Atari seemingly just sat on the Ghostbusters license they had exclusive rights to use, but when they realized the expiration date for it was coming up soon, a new game was rushed into production. With supposedly only four months to build an entirely new game things looked bleak from the start, but the true horror lies in how the game actually turned out.

 

Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime is a top-down action game with a focus on four player cooperative play, although three AI players can fill out the squad if need be. The original four Ghostbusters are not the characters you’ll be playing as, the four familiar faces instead hiring on some newbies to take on the game’s 12 levels as a group. Players are able to pick between the team scientist Gabriel, the tough go-getter Bridget, the complaining coward Samuel, and the more serious member Alan, but they are all functionally similar so it’s not too important who you end up with. This small squad’s interactions aren’t really too interesting nor are they too boring, the group quipping often enough you can get to know them but none of them standing out as particularly memorable, funny, or endearing. The original Ghostbusters team mostly put in cameo roles or assist in some form during the comic book style cutscenes that can actually be rather long as they set up the story for this particular ghostbusting adventure.

 

Many centuries ago a demonic god called Dumazu died, and in order to make sure the destroyer didn’t return to our world, a cult was established to ensure he never rose again. However, over the years the knowledge of Dumazu disappeared slowly, until only one cult member was left. However, Ismael McEnthol was not interested in keeping Dumazu contained, instead hoping to find a way to unite the pieces of relic that would revive Dumazu so he could destroy the world. As the relic pieces begin to radiate strange energy, ghosts all around New York rise and start attacking the citizenry, and while the Ghostbusters are first just called in for their unique form of pest control, they encounter Ismael who tricks them into gathering more pieces of the relic. Thankfully the four newbie busters aren’t being deceived the entire plot and become more proactive in trying to deal with the Dumazu situation, but the story isn’t quite as exciting once you learn relic pieces are kept in rather tame locales like a sewer and hotel.

When you are in a level, the goal is to move from room to room and defeat every ghostly enemy you encounter. You can’t progress to the next area until the current area’s ghosts are all wiped out, so very quickly it becomes clear that Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime will just be a linear push to fight battle after battle. If the fights were varied enough and fun this wouldn’t be a problem, but the way you fight ghosts is shallow and often made worse by its attempts to mix things up. You have three main weapon types to use in battle, their use simple enough as one control stick handles movement and the other the direction you’re firing your weapon. Alternating between weapons is important as ghosts taking more damage from the weapon that matches their color. This is fine when they’re red since that lines up with the boring but efficient attack of your regular proton beam, the sustained laser somewhat unruly and prone to snagging on even small environmental objects or allies but easy to aim and deal consistent damage with. However, if the enemy is a different color then the wrong weapon will barely damage them, so when yellow and blue ghosts start appearing, you need to draw on the appropriate weapons. The yellow Fermion Shock fires slowly and shoots out a wide shot that makes fighting anything yellow with a bit of health slow, but the blue Plasma Inductor’s ricocheting shots have an issue. They’re stronger when they bound off of walls before hitting their target, but enemies move constantly, not all walls function properly with the weapon, and battles are often too quick or arenas too filled with obstructions to incorporate this aspect of the weapon for anything but the slowest of foes or the dumbest ones who you’ve managed to trick into getting trapped on the other side of an object they don’t realize they can walk around.

 

While the weapons range from easy to use but bland to flawed in concept and too slow to keep up with many of the ghost filled battles, the enemies aren’t exactly doing much to make the battles more exciting either. A lot of them just move towards you to strike or throw something from afar, but one problem emerges in that you can get stunned by one attack and suddenly hit by more since there’s no mercy invincibility or way to escape while reeling. Having multiple enemies of different colors on screen can lead to situations where a flying skull or spider can get in close and damage you since you can’t swap quickly enough, and while this is technically something that can be handled by your partners, the AI allies are awful in this game. They do try to revive any partner who goes down, but they’ll not consider the danger that body is near and often get killed themselves for trying. During fights they may use the wrong weapon or barely contribute, and despite this problem the game likes to spawn in tons of spirits for its fights so that you can find yourself overwhelmed by a horde that you were supposed to have help with.

Even with humans on your side the ghosts still have plenty of problems that make fighting them harder than it needs to be. Some might just turn invisible when the game definitely doesn’t intend them to do so, spiders especially just disappearing from sight but still able to hurt you. Large lumbering ghosts that barf up dangerous slime can have their attacks briefly flicker out of existence or disappear and reappear in strange ways, and unfortunately your AI allies seem to not realize the issue with standing in the path of such attacks that will continuously drain their life.

 

While every battle is a bit of a bore you won’t always encounter such extreme frustrations at least, some just requiring mindless firing at the ghosts as they gradually make their presence known. Other times though you will find yourself in a boss battle, and these have their own problems as well. Nocnitsa has a unique idea where it shrinks in size the more damage it takes, but this spinning spirit with large claws and a helmet will home in and almost always instantly kill a team member during its attacks, meaning revival chains are necessary to survive this fight that otherwise wouldn’t pack much of a threat if it couldn’t unavoidably move in and hit you. Subway Smasher, despite being a cool design as a subway train turned fire-breathing worm, has such an easy to predict pattern only an AI player could be hurt by its tricks. Some like the chef ghost just feel like a regular spirit with a fatter health bar though, with few fights really asking for much beyond either eking out survival against cheap attacks or avoiding an easily exploited attack pattern.

 

There are some levels where you are aboard a vehicle and firing your proton beam out to hold enemies at bay, but they’re so simple during those portions that the only danger seems to be when you get out of the car and fight on foot for a bit. I won’t fault the game for this attempt to inject a little variety though, because elsewhere in the game it gets extremely lazy. The game’s non-boss or training levels consist of a hotel, a cemetery, a sewer, an asylum, and those road battles. However, each of these is repeated in the second half of the game as the story struggles to justify the repetition, and while you are technically moving through new rooms, setting the hotel on fire or turning the asylum into a boss gauntlet of most of your previous foes doesn’t make them feel distinct, especially as many of the ghost enemies are rehashes for these portions. The back half of the game loses its appeal quickly when you realize what it’s doing, and since this is the portion of the game where it likes to throw tons of enemies at you at once as well as ones who can easily down a teammate in an instant, you can encounter some places like an area in Level 10 where you have to struggle to keep fighting not because of legitimate challenge, but because you have to backpedal constantly while firing weakly at the slime zombies chasing you in circles.

THE VERDICT: Unfortunately, Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime can’t be dismissed as just a broken game, because there are moments where things are technically working as intended and they’re boring and unmemorable. Instead, most of your memories of this game will be struggling as your AI partners blindly get themselves killed, ghosts glitch or attack in ways you aren’t really equipped to handle with such allies, and bosses that are at their best when they have bland predictable patterns so you can slowly whittle them down. Maybe this batch of ghostbusting rookies could have had an exciting story about their battle to prevent Dumazu’s awakening, but instead they’re barely competent during the action and the world around them seems to be falling apart at the seams. Repeating level settings and unambitious ghost design just ensures that Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime is always on a downward slope, one that only levels out at a few points where things can briefly become tolerable or too easy to really begrudge.

 

And so, I give Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime for PlayStation 3…

A TERRIBLE rating. One of the clearest cut cases of a licensed game cash grab, this ill-conceived co-op action game was slapped together so quickly that no one seemed to stop to see if things work or are even fun. The color-switching system for your three weapons makes sense as a means to get the player to use all three of their attack types, but none of the weapons are really all that appealing or work the best, and with the way ghosts are grouped, you still need to handle these well enough or Ghostbusters will start dropping like flies to spirits of the wrong color. The bad ally AI makes it harder than it needs to be when playing alone, but certain areas and fights are designed to practically make revival a pipe dream so you can still face the same issues with human allies. Rehashing the settings really lays bare how little they could make in the short amount of time they had, but nothing made Atari wait so long to produce another Ghostbusters game. Rushing it out like this practically ensured some of the worse glitches and slip-ups would be in the final product. Playing with friends might make some of the simpler levels barely tolerable, but mostly you’ll find a game that’s mindless and lacking any sort of engaging fight, weapon, or enemy concept to get you excited for moving into the next room where the same ghost busting process will begin again.

 

Atari managed to pull off something impressive in getting the original Ghostbusters cast back together for Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and it even managed to nail aspects Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime slipped on like ghosts who feel distinctly different to fight and weapons that actually can be satisfying to use or are more than poorly done alternatives to the raw effectiveness of a proton beam. This is the kind of game that makes you appreciate in retrospect the care, creativity, and fan service put into that earlier title, so at least you can find an enjoyable and well put together Ghostbusters game if you go looking for one rather than having to settle for this cynical attempt to squeeze a bit more money out of a brand that was about to escape Atari’s grip.