It’s been almost twenty years since Ghostbusters II hit theatres, and fans have been hanging out for the third movie ever since. With each passing year, such an occurrence seemed less and less likely, but now we’ve got Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which reunites the four original members of the team, all voiced by their original actors, in a new story written by the original writers. The actual game side of the experience isn’t quite as good as one would hope, but the strength of the cast’s performances and new story overshadow a lot of the game’s shortcomings.

The story picks up about two years after the events of Ghostbusters II. Things are going pretty well for the Ghostbusters since their defeat of Vigo the Carpathian (who amusingly sits in the office and mocks the player). The Ghostbusters now have a service contract with the City of New York, who took out a giant insurance policy to help cover all of the damage done in the name of trapping spooks. All is not well however, as a new Gozer exhibit at the New York Museum starts stirring up all sorts of paranormal activity. Players control a new recruit who joins the Ghostbusters to find out the cause of the strange phenomena, as well as test out a bunch of experimental equipment.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game features a pretty strong story and script as far as video games go. It was written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who wrote the first two movies, so it’s not your typical hackneyed film license cash in. The characters remain true to their original personalities; Ray’s child-like enthusiasm, Venkman’s dry wit and Egon’s egg headed nature are all present and accounted for. Unlike most actors from Hollywood dragged onto licensed projects, the actors reprising their roles for the game (the four original Ghostbusters plus Annie Potts (Janine) and William Atherton (Walter Peck)) seem genuinely enthusiastic about being back together. The most notable of these is Dan Aykroyd, whose love of the project really shines through in his performance. It’s not entirely perfect – some scenes seem like they were included purely to play on nostalgia, namely the fight against Stay Puft and the Librarian. Fortunately, the way they’ve been worked into the story makes some sense – it could have been a lot worse.

It’s disappointing that the game doesn’t really hold up its end of the bargain. Ghostbusters follows a pretty strict formula of following a hallway into an open area, trapping some ghosts or defeating other enemies, and then repeating with little in the way of variation. Being the rookie, you’re almost always accompanied by one of the four original Ghostbusters – it’s very rare that you are left to your own resources. Having the Ghostbusters yapping in your ear helps to build a convincing atmosphere, but the shine wears off after a while. Being a Ghostbuster means playing around with lots of fancy gadgets for tracking and catching ghosts. When tracking a ghost, you’ll get to wear a set of goggles and bring out your psychokinetic energy (PKE) meter – the handheld device with the extending arms. While wearing this device, you can also scan ghosts to add them to your copy of Tobin’s Spirit Guide, as well as taking samples of slime and chasing down some hidden objects that can take back to Ghostbusters HQ to study.


Trapping a ghost is a fairly straightforward process. Players need to wear the ghost down using the proton pack and neutrino wand, then grab it with a restraining beam, slam it into a few surfaces and guide it into the trap. Catching some ghosts can be tricky, but one or more of the Ghostbusters is usually around to lend a hand. Your proton gun can do some damage to the environment, which proves to be quite fun. One needs to be careful when directing the proton stream around and you can potentially hit one of your teammate, or cross the streams. Crossing the streams doesn’t quite result in total plutonic reversal, but it will knock you to the ground and leave you open to damage. While the proton stream looks the part, the tactile feedback seems slightly lacking. The Ghostbusters are wearing unlicensed nuclear accelerators on their back, and firing out a serious amount of energy from their neutrino wands, yet the stream seems kind of weak against the ghosts, and there’s no rumbling from the controller while you’re firing off a stream (only when the pack overheats). Terminal Reality had ample time to get the feeling right, but it just feels off.

Being the rookie, you get to try out a bunch of new experimental weapons Egon and Ray have been working on. These include the Bozon dart, a rocket launcher-like secondary fire for the proton pack, the Meson collider (a powerful energy weapon), the slime gun which can also be used to tether ghosts and objects to the environment and a stasis gun to slow or freeze ghosts. Upgrades for your weapons and gadgets can be purchased with money gained from trapping ghosts, allowing you to increase the strength of each weapon, lower the heat production or shorten the cooling period, ensuring that the player doesn’t need to vent their pack as often. Despite the potential for dozens of different ghost based enemies, many of the ghosts act the same with the differences being only skin-deep. Non-ghost enemies are usually made from possessed parts of the environment, and simply need to be drained of their energy. The lack of variation ends up making combat more of a drag than it should be.


The main story campaign of Ghostbusters won’t take more than 8 hours to complete. It’s not particularly challenging, apart from a couple of sections where the difficulty spikes unexpectedly. There are a few extra bits to duck back into the single player game for, like artefact collecting and completing the spirit guide. There’s an online multiplayer component that lets you team up with four other players to complete six different jobs, which can be played consecutively in a mini-campaign, if you wish. It’s not all that different from the single player side of the game, but playing with human controlled teammates is a little more satisfying.

Ghostbusters is powered by Terminal Reality’s own Infernal Engine, but the game isn’t particularly good looking. The game often looks really rough, with low quality textures and highly aliased character models. Each of the Ghostbusters is a fairly good digital representation of what the actors looked like about 20 years ago, but the animation is stiff at the best of times. Still, the game has a lot going on, especially with the highly destructible environments and physics system, and the effects of firing off a proton stream and catching a ghost look really good. Some of the game’s environments in the middle part of the game look pretty cool too – if the extra detail was there, they’d be a lot better off.

As far as licensed titles go, Ghostbusters: The Video Game is one of the few that really fits in well with the source material, owing largely to the fact that the story was written by the original writers, and the original team is back together to provide voices – and does a great job of doing so. Fandom and nostalgia really can’t make up for the fact that the gameplay is not as good as it should have been – wrangling ghosts feels a little hollow, and the level design is really linear and claustrophobic. Fans of the original movies will get a big kick out of Ghostbusters, but most players will be best serviced with a rental.