Ghostbusters: The Video Game

It is with extreme, cheese-filled regret that we admit this, but…busting actually does make us feel good. We really didn’t want to put it that way, but the heroic fun practically oozes out of Ghostbusters: The Video Game in both singleplayer and multiplayer modes.

We recently got a chance to march through the first few hours of the campaign, which included many of the areas already seen in our earlier previews — the return to the Sedgewick Hotel to recapture Slimer, the office building fight against Stay-Puft, and the journey through the New York Public Library to get the librarian ghost that got away. But this time, we also got to explore the Ghostbusters firehouse, escort the Ecto-1 to Times Square, and search for secret collectibles with our PKE meter.

Crucially, we finally got to hear all the actors playing their roles in full. Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman is the lazy ladies’ man — perhaps sounding a little older, but his ass is also a little wiser. (Case in point, in a pickup line to new love interest Dr. Ilisya Selwyn: “You know, I never forget a face…attached…to all the rest of that.”) Ray Stantz still sounds as enthusiastic as ever; it’s as if Dan Aykroyd never stopped playing the role. You’ll get to hear plenty of Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddemore, too, since you pair up with everybody for parts of missions — clearing debris from shattered New York streets with Winston, for instance, or blasting spectral books in the bowels of the library with Ray. The ghost-wrangling and trapping mechanic still felt fun several hours into the game: playing with new proton-pack functionality like the ghost-freezing Stasis Stream and sticky Slime Tether offered some welcome variety.

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