Review: Ghostbusters: The Video Game Still Lacks Finesse in Remastered Form

The brunt of the work here has gone into raising the game’s resolution and frame rate, and implementing higher quality assets all around.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered
Photo: Mad Dog Games

In retrospect, it was perhaps too much to expect that 2009’s Ghostbusters: The Video Game capture the lightning in a bottle that even Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters II couldn’t back in 1989. That was the state of things before Ghostbusters as a beloved property became one of the bloodiest cultural battlegrounds of the century, all thanks to the outrageous, unthinkable, dangerous idea that maybe, just maybe, women could be Ghostbusters. Now, in the wake of that little experiment failing to set the world on fire, Ghostbusters: The Video Game is back, theoretically representing exactly what the gatekeeping Übermensch fans of the franchise said they wanted, and loudly so, in 2016: the original cast, working off a script from Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, with all the stuff they liked from the original, minus a Rick Moranis or Sigourney Weaver cameo or two. And 10 years have only accentuated everything that’s fascinating and frustrating about this approach.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game takes place in 1991, two years after the whole Vigo the Carpathian business from Ghostbusters II. When the story begins, a museum exhibit on Gozer the Gozerian sends out a pulse of energy that seems to bring a huge influx of new and old ghosts back to New York City. With the Ghostbusters’ mayhem now fully subsidized by Gracie Mansion, our heroes can afford to bring on some help. They do so in the form of a new, voiceless sap—that’d be your player character—who’ll be testing out some of Egon’s experimental gear while lending a hand cleaning up the town. That concept is sound, but the execution needs finesse that the game just doesn’t provide, even in its remastered form.

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In particular, the mute player character is one of those gaming tropes that needs to go away forever, but even then, a lot could’ve been forgiven if you were allowed to customize your character in any way instead of being stuck with Generic Milquetoast White Guy #247916. It’s worth noting here that that’s a minor advantage that the Wii and PS2 ports of the game had over their big brothers: You couldn’t customize, but you could at least pick a female character. Those two ports also sported a more stylized cartoon aesthetic that actually made for a much more freewheeling and loose experience, where this version’s lackluster attempt at realism in the character models invites scrutiny that does the game zero favors. An option to switch between the art styles, if not a complete overhaul of the in-game graphics, would have made a world of difference in making this remaster feel like an expansive, all-encompassing archival effort. Suffice it to say, that kind of effort didn’t happen here.

The brunt of the work here has gone into raising the game’s resolution and frame rate, and implementing higher quality assets all around. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and there are plenty of environments like the firehouse, the famous Sedgewick Hotel, Times Square, and the ghost dimension that do manage to impress. But there’s only so much a developer can do to polish up elements that already looked mediocre in 2009 with a graphical boost. Ultimately, Mad Dog Games’s lack of extra attention to everything beyond aesthetics means that the gameplay has no choice but to shine. Which, surprisingly, it does.

If there’s any one thing that Ghostbusters: The Video Game got right from the day it dropped in 2009, it’s that all the bustin’ it has you do feels incredibly good. The core mechanics of laying into ghosts with a proton pack, sending out a trap, and wrangling a ghost into it is laid out in almost Gears of War-lite fashion. You just don’t get the comparative safety of a cover system or, really, much in the means of protection at all. You’re just some weak-chinned schmuck carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator. You can be thrown down easily just from a ghost flying through you fast enough, which does, admittedly, make for some cheap hits along the way, especially in a particularly aggravating stretch that takes place in a graveyard. But the game perfectly captures a crucial, under-sung element of the films: being a working-class nerd who, as part of a team, has to put actual strenuous effort into capturing ghosts.

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Indeed, the game’s at its best when it leans into this just being another day, another dollar for the Ghostbusters, only with different ghosts, instead of trying too hard to live up to the player’s nostalgia with constant callbacks and references to the first film. The original cast is extremely present and doing heroic work trying to elevate the script, but so much of the game exudes a been-there-done-that feel. Whatever the problems with both Ghostbusters II and the 2016 reboot of the 1984 film, the one big takeaway is that the very idea of ghostbusters, as a premise to hinge an entire story upon, benefits from each new entry refusing to simply reiterate and regurgitate the iconic scenes and set pieces from the original film.

The stories we learn about the game’s ghosts through PKE scans are fantastic, nuanced, detailed tales that even weave in a bit of real New York City history and paranormal concepts (interestingly, both this and the 2016 film smartly use the idea of NYC’s grid geography to create ley lines). As such, it’s a bit of a shame how little the game does to make Ghostbusters’s lore into something different and better, which, actually does make the fact that the remaster does very little for the game as a whole pretty appropriate.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Sandbox Strategies.

Score: 
 Developer: Saber Interactive  Publisher: Mad Dog Games  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: October 8, 2019  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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