The Haunted Hoard: Ghostbusters (PS4)

In 2016 a Ghostbusters reboot was produced, and in the game meant to tie into the film, Activision took a very strange approach. Ghostbusters on PS4, Xbox One, and PC is almost like a reboot in itself, taking the gameplay style of Atari’s Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime and knocking five years of dust off its gameplay style for another go at a top-down four player shooter. Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime was a poorly made and aggravating experience, but whereas the Ghostbusters film made in 2016 was attempting to remake a quality film, the game could have been a chance to fix the issues of a terrible game. Unfortunately, while Ghostbusters on PS4 is definitely superior to Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime, it’s only by a slim margin.

Ghostbusters on PS4 takes place after the events of the 2016 film, the four ladies called away from their ghost hunting work in New York to protect the president from ghostly assassins, and unfortunately this detail is never reincorporated so you never get to play that striking level concept. Instead, players assume the roles of the four Ghostbusters who are holding down the fort while they’re gone, and unfortunately the game never says their name in any form. To actually learn the names of the characters you play as you’ll have to consult unused files in the game’s code, and I’ll be using the names found there so I’m not just identifying them by their appearance or unique ghostbusting weaponry. Meadow feels like the leader of the group, her scientific knowledge making her perhaps the only member who takes anything seriously even though she can indulge in a quip filled repartee with the others at times. Megan is the team’s other female member, rebellious, rude, and with an in your face attitude to match some of her more morbid quirks. Chaz fills a fairly standard role, quick to joke and dive into the action so he fits neatly into a jovial hero type, with the big guy Bob balancing him out as a more friendly yet dim character the others can bounce off of.

The four characters all feel almost like they were ripped out of a Saturday morning cartoon similar to the Extreme Ghostbusters show, and while they are unfortunately hard to hear when they banter in a regular level since they’re relatively quiet in noisy battles, the scenes where they engage with some exaggerated character to set up the next level lets them show off who they are fairly well. However, the game’s box art is a bit unusual after you see Bob is way too large to be one of the people on the cover and both Meadow and Megan have hair that wouldn’t fit within those silhouette shapes, and even if those shadows were meant to mimic the women from the film there is still no way to accurately line up those silhouettes with the four actresses’ proportions. The deceptive marketing would perhaps sting a little less if they actually tried to make more out of the four characters they wouldn’t even dignify with actual names, but these are all incidental details in a game that puts much of its focus on its action.

Ghostbusters on PS4 has seven playable areas, some with multiple missions within them but one of the most shocking facts about the choice of environments are how many are direct analogues to ones seen in Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime. While having a graveyard crop up in a ghost-hunting game could easily get a pass, there is also one portion of the game set in an insane asylum and while this game technically goes for a subway system over copying the sewers from Sanctum of Slime, the level designers still have you passing through pipes and parts of the sewer during that portion.  Thankfully the game doesn’t rehash all its levels for a second run through like Sanctum of Slime though, although all the bosses do crop up for rematches near the end in a similar manner to that game. The visit to Aldridge Manor near the start is unfortunately one mission long compared to the other areas having multiple stages to go through, but the Queen Charlotte Hotel is perhaps the most unique location in concept, the hotel aboard a boat able to prevent overlapping with Sanctum of Slime’s hotel level thanks to the nautical twist.

Putting aside comparisons to a previous game for a bit, the levels in Ghostbusters for PS4 are unfortunately quite lacking. Players push forward, fight whatever ghosts pop into existence in the current room, and keep moving. You are able to break a lot of the furniture and environmental objects for points but doing so can slow down a game that can already feel like it’s plodding along, but there are legitimate secrets to find. Pulling out your P.K.E. meter will let you scan the ground for sigils that can grant extra points, lead you to extra rooms with goodies like the game’s special collectables, or you might trigger a fight with a ghost swarm that has a high point payout. Points go towards leveling up your characters so they can gain new abilities and there are enough decent ones to grab so that you’ll want to go for them when you can, but incentivizing the dilly-dallying with furniture breaking and slow P.K.E. scanning with worthwhile upgrades unfortunately means levels will probably drag as its hard to resist such bonuses.

One reason you’ll want the bonuses is definitely to make the battles more manageable. The four playable characters all have a unique ghostbusting weapon only they can use as well as special grenade type. Chaz has an assault rifle analogue that is quick, decently strong and reliable, and you’ll probably want to pick him because the no frills weapon makes fighting off ghosts so much easier to manage. However, he does have the flashbang grenade that often fails to even stun ghosts when thrown their way, so seeing Bob’s slime grenade actually slow foes down might make you envious of him until you remember he has a minigun that takes time to rev up and isn’t as accurate as Chaz’s gun despite the higher damage output. Megan’s dual pistol setup is close to Chaz’s in that it is fairly accurate and can be fired rapidly, but they are weaker so she gets a dark matter grenade that inflicts a damaging status effect on whoever it hits. Meadow probably has the most reliable grenade with her electrical variant constantly shocking ghosts in its radius for a bit but she gets stuck with a slow firing shotgun in a game where tens of ghosts can be zipping around the screen causing trouble and a slow fire rate means its hard to track and take them down. No one Ghostbuster is so awful they can’t keep up with the action, but if you’re going to play with other humans instead of AI partners who are thankfully able to hold their own and revive each other often, then you’ll probably have players who feel stuck with their underwhelming character.

Rather than using ammunition, the Ghostbusters’ weapons can be fired for a while before they overheat, the gun needing to cool down if the heat levels aren’t properly managed. This does make it so you aren’t just holding down the attack button the whole fight, your only other real options for tackling ghosts being to toss grenades when they’re available or whipping out the proton beam if you want to deal less damage. However I did encounter one major glitch with the overheat system where at one point my character overheated and his weapon would never return to normal. I couldn’t switch weapons, reloading from checkpoint didn’t fix it, and I had to actually exit out of the game entirely to allow him to finally fire his weapon again. Otherwise the game does seem fairly stable, the only other easily identified flub in the programming being the odd way the Terror Dog enemy will pounce forward only to abruptly teleport back to its starting location.

Speaking of the Terror Dog, it’s actually one of the few enemies in the game that isn’t repackaged in some way. A lot of Ghostbusters on PS4’s variety feels rather artificial. It’s not too surprising that the basic undead you face in areas like the psych ward, graveyard, and subway are essentially the same spirit in a different get-up, their role as fodder that is more dangerous as a group or a supplement in a fight against something more dangerous not requiring much creativity. They do at least give some the ability to detonate later on so you need to give that variant some room, but it’s the rehashing of the stronger ghost types that drags down the experience. The mobster ghosts in the graveyard will throw objects at you and do little whirlwind twirls to attack, as do the nurse ghosts in the asylum after. Later on you do get some of the big ghosts having a new move on top of the usual attacks, but these slightly stronger ghost types all still seem to pull on the same ideas so it doesn’t matter when they’re reskinned or whipping out some variation on a projectile. They sometimes have an elemental affinity like fire that causes fireballs to spray out during the fight, but your dodging only involves moving around or doing a dodge roll with fairly generous invincibility. If you can avoid one type of projectile, you can avoid them all, there not being any more depth in avoiding a slightly different arc or a technically different element.

The game features four variations on the famous fat specter known as Slimer to serve as little minibosses until they’re thrown around with the strong ghosts as well, and while they’re more animated in their movements and attacks, your fighting approach won’t change much. However, the boss fights do sometimes manage to feel quite distinct. The voodoo priestess Marie Devaux starts her fight surrounded by swirling specters you need to gradually blast away to get to her all while the dead rise from their graves to harass you. The electrocuted ghost Sparky will shock you if you’re too close and will create little beams of electricity that section off areas of the arena and lead to the only other boss fight that really feels like it’s changing things up from firing constantly while avoiding smaller ghosts. Some fights like the final boss are a bit underwhelming, and Mayhem the gargoyle-like spirit is perhaps too aggressive in constantly walking into you when he’s not flying around and invincible, so they’re a bit of a mixed bag too. However, for fans of the 2016 Ghostbusters film you will recognize some of its major ghosts as bosses in this game which makes for a nice touch, and while the game tries to come up with some spirits of its own, haunted candelabras are a lot more indicative of its usual creativity rather than its use of a spiritual singer with rose thorn wings and vine attacks.

The last gameplay aspect of note is an underwhelming one. When it’s time to actually capture a boss ghost or one of the tougher regular ones, you’ll need to whip out your proton beam to hook it and start to try and weaken it with slams. This manifests as needing to hold the control stick in an indicated direction counter to how the ghost is currently moving, this process rather slow and only dangerous if other ghosts are still around to harass you during it. Sometimes a ghost might run in circles too which means your control stick inputs aren’t read as quickly, but after slamming it a few times, you can eventually throw the trap and then need to mash a button quickly if you want to get the max points. This snagging process is often a tepid capstone to a fight that already was far too similar to those before it, but even more interesting fights like Sparky still have that boilerplate ghost trap finale that gets pretty old before you’ve even finished the early stages.

THE VERDICT: Thankfully, much of Ghostbusters on PS4 is boring and tedious rather than frustrating so it can be mindlessly pushed through, and the rare emergence of something novel can make that process more bearable. However, the reused enemy types make trekking through bland levels less appealing, the few intriguing boss fights are weakened by the actual trapping process that becomes old way too early, and the attempt to diversify the playable characters instead makes them unappealing to play as. You’re forced to stick with only one real weapon option in a level and some are less effective at handling battles that often involve a bunch of ghosts thrown on screen to mow down mindlessly. The technical problems are thankfully minimal, but even when it had the potential to maybe make something out of its eclectic cast, Ghostbusters on PS4 instead builds a dreadfully boring action game that carries over many of the problems with the eerily similar Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime.

And so, I give Ghostbusters for PlayStation 4…

A TERRIBLE rating. If there were a lot more instances of technical problems or the game had dragged on longer it might have ended up worse than Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime, but it does seem to at least settle into the realm of enormously boring rather than incredibly frustrating. It’s not exciting to face ghosts that are so similar to each other again and again, utilizing the same approaches to battle save for a few standout fights. The player is encouraged to drag down the already sluggish experience with all the ways to earn points by doing menial things like breaking furniture, upgrades able to help speed up the less exciting parts while paradoxically requiring engaging with those more to lessen their necessity later on. I do think the four characters had some potential to be a likeable bunch of misfits, the small shreds shown of their chemistry and the game’s sense of humor during them not exceptional but still a good way to lighten the mood in a game that needs some of the energy that a wisecracking cast could bring. The weapon system certainly feels like it needs an overhaul, even just making the proton beam a more feasible option likely able to alleviate some of the stagnation incurred by having to stick to your one gun. For all my problems with Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime, at least you had to keep switching your weapons to handle new enemy types. Ghostbusters on PS4 just makes every battle require pretty much the same approach but maybe with a little more movement when you realize a technically new ghost type hurls a slightly different projectile than the last.

It’s a common opinion that creators who do set out to reboot or remake a property should try and redeem ones that didn’t work initially. The original Ghostbusters film was a classic and thus much of the pushback the 2016 film received would come from trying to recapture the magic or make alterations to the material. However, Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime being essentially retooled into Ghostbusters on PS4 was a chance to take something awful and try to realize its potential, but while it cut away some of the flaws that top-down cooperative shooter had, it didn’t have any innovations or compelling ideas to replace them. A terrible game is often a combination of weak concepts and outright bad design choices, and you can’t just hope that taking some of those problems away redeems the material. I can’t find anything directly stating the game was an attempt to reimagine Sanctum of Slime despite the numerous similarities, but I would at least like to give the game credit for attempting to fix the design of that troubled product since otherwise it just means the development team stumbled into similar failures. Perhaps the idea of a top down Ghostbusters game truly is a cursed one.