>>334011
>>334037
Alright then, here's my review of Ghostbusters. The game obviously panders heavily to people who really loved the ghostbusters movies. Which I am not really one of. I watched the first two when I was a kid and enjoyed them but that was about as far as it goes for my attachment to the ghostbusters IP.
In terms of gameplay, it's very vanilla for a third person shooter. You get money for capturing ghosts which can be used for upgrading weapons, but they're mostly just simple power increases and you can max the useful ones out very quickly. You can find collectables with the PKE meter, which will beep more aggressively as you get near them, but I found this mostly to be filler content which can easily be ignored. You have a multi directional dodge and you get a few different weapons that you can switch to at any given time which each having a secondary attack, and mechanically they all handle pretty similarly. You have;
>Laser (+Explosive secondary)
>Slowing laser (+Shotgun secondary)
>Rapid fire laser (+Lockon secondary)
>Goo (+Physics tether)
>Gravity gun
All weapons have infinite ammo, but have an overheating system. The first three weapons are the main offensive tools and are each very similar in terms of usage. You can't really "combo" with the laser weapons, but you'll eventually learn which ones are more effective against which ghosts, but this is all pretty marginal and only worth doing if you want to capture ghosts quicker. The goo is used against environmental hazards and ghosts that are weak to it and the tether and gravity weapons are only really useful for the occasional physics puzzle. The puzzles themselves only really serve as a break in the action, although I did get stuck on one and spent 10 minutes running around the map because I couldn't find the one physics object I was supposed to interact with. I never found the gameplay itself to be particularly challenging (although I did only play on the normal difficulty). A lot of this is that for much of the game you play as a squad with the other ghostbusters and all five of you can instantly revive anyone with full health.
However the biggest strength of the game is its presentation and characters. All the actors from the movie give pretty decent performances, bantering, cracking jokes and giving commentary on what's happening. I found that there was shocking amount of running dialog from all the characters, which at best was quite funny and at worst was merely fluff. The player character is a complete silent protagonist, I'm not sure he ever so much as a utters a grunt, it's probably a desirable thing since it keeps the focus is on the other characters and the world around you. The player character does get treated as the new guy at first, appropriately so, but by the end the other ghostbusters more or less regard you as a full fledged member of the team. You do get times when the other ghostbusters will enthusiastically praise the playercharacter when you do something pretty trivial (Dan Aykroyd's character was probably the most guilty of this), but it never breached the threshold of finding it particularly annoying)
The game loves to throw you into new locations and environments and different types of ghosts to capture all the time. In terms of style everything always looks like it's taken from the films (in a positive way) and there's a healthy variety of major boss at the end of each level. There are also a hand full of FEAResk spooky moments where you find yourself in a dark room and something will try to scare you, sometimes more subtly, sometimes just a jumpscare. This game is definitely a 7th gen console shooter through and through, it's hyper linear and straight forward in terms of gameplay and generally leans on style over substance. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing, so long as you set your expectations appropriately. I believe that in so far as 7th gen shooters have positive qualities, this game embodies the best of those qualities.
There were also three entirely different versions of this game made. One for 360/PS3/PC, one for PS2/PSP/Wii and finally the DS version. I played the original PC version
on a steam deck, but my understanding is that 6th gen version keeps most of the same mechanics but fundamentally changes the art style and follows a somewhat different story with different character dialogue from the actors, and the DS version is a top down shooter with a 3D open world driving element, (which actually looks fairly impressive on the DS). There's also the "remastered" version for modern consoles and PC but as far as I know, it's virtually identical as the 7th gen version, with no enhancements what so ever (not even a frame rate increase on the consoles) and only exists due to licensing problems with the original. The game also worked perfectly on linux when I played it, even though it wasn't tested by valve.
Overall I found it enjoyable, nothing deep or complex, but simple fun. Capturing ghosts is always entertaining, the character banter is good and there was never anything offensively bad I came across.