Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed
Long ago, Illfonic made a game based on the Friday the 13th series, turning it into an asynchronous online multiplayer game. It clearly had a love of passion and love for the franchise put in to the game, and although it was riddled with bugs and glitches, it was still a pretty fun game. Now, Illfonic has made a game based on the Ghostbusters series, turning it into an asynchronous multiplayer game, and while the game is littered with glitches and bugs, the passion for the license shines through and it's still a pretty fun game.
This is the first big Ghostbusters game since 2009's Ghostbusters: The Video Game, but where 2009's was focused on a solid single player adventure with a lot of story and a script that was at least partially co-written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, Spirits Unleashed follows some familiar beats from recent games like Dead By Daylight, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th and others by having a team based online game be the main focus. Speaking from a gameplay perspective, I find it interesting that each game is pretty unique in the way it handles the classic ghostbusters equipment, but each one feels right in its own way. In 2009's game, since it was single player you were zapping and trapping ghosts left and right, including a cool slam move, where you would pull the proton stream in a direction and slam the ghost against a surface to where it out for the trap. But the flow of the game has to be completely different when it's just one ghost, and that ghost is a human player. I feel like they found a pretty good balance between ghostbuster and ghost, where it's not often that one or the other has too much of an advantage.
That being said, sometimes I feel like I'm just not great at this type of game! I'll be playing the ghost, and feel like the entire time I'm doing nothing but running from the ghostbuster team, and that no matter where I go they immediately find me, giving me no time to regain stamina or do much of anything. Then I'll play as a ghostbuster, and feel like I can never catch the ghosts as he constantly flies away! So I'm guessing that's more a 'me' problem!
The customization options for your buster are pretty great, and after the latest update are even better. I love the addition of two patches you can add somewhere on your outfit now, and you can unlock more to collect and show off. There's lot of different clothing options and color choices for everything, so each person really looks unique, which is nice. Ghost customization is a little smaller, with a selection of colors for each ghost. I'm not really sure how they would add too much customization for each one, but there's got to be something more. Give Slimer some hats or something!
I guess my biggest gripe so far (apart from me not learning to get good) would be the number of maps in the game. It started at 5, and after the last big update, we're now at 6. I really like the maps that are here so far though, especially the new map of the run down/under construction hospital. Each area is completely different and places that are fun to see a ghost wreaking havoc in, like a bar, a museum, or a lodge. But if you play for a while you're going to start seeing the same maps over and over again. I realize they probably want to make sure there aren't *too many* maps, because then you'll never become very familiar with what's there, but I feel we need a couple more. Hmmm, what are some other places that would make good haunted places? I think a school setting would be fun, maybe an old high school or a more modern looking college campus building. Maybe a theme park kind of setting?
The game has a short single player story, but gameplay wise there's no difference, but rather the story only unfolds in cutscenes between your games. So for instance, if you play a certain number of rounds, either online with others or offline with bots, when you return to the firehouse, you'll be treated to the next story cutscene. I can at least appreciate that they gave us a bit of story to help show where in Ghostbusters lore it takes place (it's after Afterlife), and it gives us an introduction to two new NPC characters at the Firehouse, so the story helps develop a bit of a personality for them. Plus they got Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson to voice their characters, so hearing more from the two of them in their Ghostbusters characters is always welcome! So the story never really involves you, the player, it's just something happening at the firehouse that you see play out around your actual playing of the game. But my biggest problem was that I felt the ending of the story resolved itself too quickly, where I was just left wondering if it was over when it was over!
Ah, but I should mention the voice chat! Sigh. I feel like to be a proper Ghostbuster team, and to be a good video game team, voice chat is very important. But! I'm usually way to shy to actually use it much. It's isn't helped that I've had problems with the push-to-talk mapping on my controller. Right now my contributions are usually just saying something like "GG, everyone" when a match is over. Voice chat can enhance the game, but I've also come across plenty of times when it made a round so much less fun! Ghostbusters complaining to each other when they are in the way of each other or miss the ghost. Or when I was a ghost and one of the busters kept hurling insults at me and insulting my playing. Or just the kid that sounds like he's 10 that kept going "Hello? Can you guys here me?" over and over because no one would respond. Good voice chat is good, but man bad voice chat just makes it less fun! That being said, I haven't heard anything particularly bad, no slurs or anything, so hey, maybe it's way better than voice chat on practically every other online game!
Overall I feel the online team-based asynchronous kind of gameplay really lends itself well to the Ghostbusters franchise. I hope the game does well enough to keep a large pool of players coming back to play, and more content gets added every now and then. With another Ghostbusters game due out this June, it's feeling like a really good time to be a Ghostbusters gamer!