Ghostbusters The Video Game (DS)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.0 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Austin Light
• Reviewed on: 06/16/2009
• Released on: 06/16/2009
• Originally published on GameSpot: Ghostbusters The Video Game (DS) Review

Ghostbusters for the Nintendo DS has everything you'd expect from a great Ghostbusters adventure: the Ecto-1's iconic siren, a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man rampage, plenty of smarmy Peter Venkman one-liners, and more scientific spectral lingo than you can shake a proton beam at. Unfortunately, many of the gameplay elements tying these things together are about as solid as the ghosts you spend your time busting. While this action role-playing hybrid certainly improves on the series' poor video game track record, these Ghostbusters probably shouldn't be first on your call list.

Set not long after the second movie, Ghostbusters follows the famous ghoul-trapping pack of entrepreneurs on a new adventure through a haunted New York. The story, penned by the films' writers, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, contains a few memorable moments and chuckle-worthy lines, but it pales in comparison to the first two films. The return of some of the enemies, characters, and locations from the movies feels less like fan service and more like laziness in most cases.

Unlike the console versions, the DS game has you controlling the four original Ghostbusters instead of a nameless new guy. You move your team with the D pad, zap ghosts and whittle down their energy by holding the stylus on them, and then slide out traps with the left shoulder button. Most of the game is played from a top-down perspective, like in the action RPG games Baldur's Gate or Diablo. Ghostbusters borrows more than the camera angle of those games, though: the gameplay and overall structure should be familiar to anyone with hack-and-slash RPG experience. You pick up quests from the station, upgrade your weapons and characters, grab loot from some downed enemies, and even solve a few puzzles. It's a perfect genre for the Ghostbusters, but the execution is flawed.

Most missions are straight out of the action RPG playbook, but instead of killing rats in cellars with a rusty axe, you're zapping ghosts in sewers with a proton beam. These diversions serve as filler between main story missions, which are offered every few in-game days. Tackling these boring tasks is optional, but ignoring them costs you reputation points. If you lose too many reputation points, you lose the game, so you'll have to take on at least a couple of "go there, shoot this" jobs in between the more interesting story missions. The story missions feature more dramatic set pieces, a few simple puzzles, and a bunch of witty banter from the busters. Though they offer more entertainment, the story missions aren't without problems. Some of them require you to split up your ghost-busting team using simple commands (stop or follow), which leaves your allies to rely on their equally simple AI. It can be a pain to switch between your team members to make sure they continue to do what you need them to, especially when their courage meter--an arbitrary bar that measures their bravery--is low, which sends them running around out of control for a few seconds.

Each Ghostbuster has several abilities and skills to upgrade and develop, but you're rarely prompted to do so. To make matters worse, neglecting your level-up duties has little impact on the missions until the last few. Even if you do spring for some extra abilities, activating them requires you to switch to the appropriate team member and press the B button. That sounds easy, but during hectic battles when your team is spread thin and you're scribbling away on the screen, it's far from convenient. You can also have new weapons and gadgets researched and developed using the money and slime earned from missions, but again, you're rarely encouraged to. You could easily finish a number of missions in a row without ever exploring these extra bits (all are accessible by visiting different areas in the station, your main hub), which is a shame because they add some much-needed variety to the game.

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