In the end, Ghostbusters has rare moments when it doesn't feel like an utter waste of time. But it's mostly a bizarre slog through mostly empty, overly cumbersome levels full of extreme repetition. Even for devoted fans of the films and four-player co-op shooters, Ghostbusters is a disappointment.
This is the sort of game that great uncles and grandmas are going to buy for the young people in their lives because they heard Ghostbusters was popular, or that littler kids will point out in the mall just after seeing the movie. But no informed gamer should fall for the siren song of that catchy main theme. It’s not actively painful to play if you happen to be at your eight-year-old cousin’s house and need a co-op game for six to eight hours that’s not going to require much skill. But you could do so much better. I can’t imagine ever wanting to drop a full 50 dollars on it, especially considering there are plenty of games out there that are equally fun to play for kids and adults.
This thing is so awful that it isn’t even worth the effort to cram in an obligatory reference to the original films. The real problem is that the likelihood of these criticisms being heard by the person responsible for releasing this mess is practically zero, seeing as how the complaints would be drowned by the deafening sounds of the giant metal clackers required to think this was okay.
The game plays fine, it has all the settings you'd expect, it has the proton packs and the car and the cartoonish undead. But otherwise it's just... empty. Bustin' doesn't make me feel good, or bad, or anything at all really. Tomorrow, this game will be a spectre itself; we'll have forgotten it was ever here at all.
In the end, Ghostbusters has rare moments when it doesn't feel like an utter waste of time. But it's mostly a bizarre slog through mostly empty, overly cumbersome levels full of extreme repetition. Even for devoted fans of the films and four-player co-op shooters, Ghostbusters is a disappointment.
Ghostbusters has a vaguely half-decent core, but stretches it too far over interminable levels wrecked by mindless repetition and a lack of strong ideas. It’s dull played solo, tedious in multi-player and generally no fun whatever you do. The new movie has its lovers and its haters, but the game will create no such divisions. Whoever you are, whatever you like, it’s just no good.
The tedium of playing through the same encounters over and over again makes Ghostbusters impossible to recommend. The awful one-liners, the poor sound design, and the boring story would be tolerable if it was fun to play, but it's not. Ghostbusters is a slog from start to finish.