Ah, yes. There it is. From the moment you load the game, Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime gets off to the right start, as it serenades you with that oh-so-familiar theme tune, that you can't help but sing one of the 118 adverts over the top of. Luckily, the game also provides us with an answer to the question the song's been eternally asking. Who ya' gonna call? Well, in the case of Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime, three of your friends, to give you a hand in this top-down, dual analogue shooter.
Rather than taking its cues from one of the films, Ghostbusters presents its story in the form of a comic book. While that may sound like a good idea in concept, sadly, the execution is a bit rotten, as the frame it's showing you rarely ever makes the most of the screen it's running on, preferring instead to stay in a tiny box in the middle, which in turns makes the writing very, very small - even if you're sat only a few feet away from a 32" TV. With no voiceovers to accompany the cutscenes, you're left to simply squint at your TV as you attempt to unravel the somewhat confusing story - a task which is made none the easier by the size of the font.
You rang?
Thankfully, when the game gets going, things quickly get a lot better. Playing a team of rookies, recruited by the original team of Ghostbusters because of an increase in activity, it's up to you to venture out to a range of dangerous, haunted locations, from a hotel, to a mental asylum, as you make your way from room to room, zapping the bad guys, and capturing bosses in the iconic ghost trap.
While games like this always work better in multiplayer, the game's AI does a reasonable job of taking over the other three characters, and keeping up with the pace, too - even if they do have a habit of standing in the way of enemy fire, and simply roasting themselves once too many for our liking. If you ever do die, you'll soon find an AI partner coming to your rescue, although sometimes they're a bit too helpful for their own good. All you have to do is die, and your team mates will be falling over themselves to help - completely forgetting the giant boss that's right behind them, that they've suddenly become the sole focus of.
As we said though, in multiplayer, a lot of these problems disappear, as you can warn any fellow human players when they're about to do something stupid. As you may expect, teamwork is the order of the day here, something that's emphasised by your weapons. As you progress through the levels, you'll gradually be introduced to a wider selection of beams for your weapons, and a wider selection of ghosts that come after you, which, thankfully, are all colour coded according to their weaknesses - blue beams work best against blue, yellow kills yellow, while red seems to work on everything else.
If you all use the same weapon on the same enemy, you'll deal immense amounts of damage.
What this often means is you'll have to keep both an eye on your team mates, and an open channel of conversation with them, as you decide who'll use what beam, while checking to make sure you go after the relevant ghosts as soon as they appear. It's a game that relies on you talking to your partners, as if you don't, you'll often find yourself falling foul of the ghosts.
That said, if you do die, your resurrection is often only a hammering of A away, as all a partner has to do is stand above you, and hammer the big green button to bring you back to the land of the living. You'll only get a game over if all four of you get knocked out - and even then, you'll simply start again from the room you left off in, only this time, you've all got full bars of health. In fact, dying hardly sets you back at all - which is a good thing, as it'll happen a lot.
Disappointingly, the enemies seem strangely unbalanced, and dish out huge amounts of damage whenever they manage to hit you. What this means is you'll end up only being able to take one or two hits before you're knocked out, and relying on a partner to come and rescue you. While it isn't much a problem in the grand scheme of things, as, like we said, dying doesn't really set you back that much, it's still frustrating when only one or two hits take you out.
Make sure you break the tables afterwards. The owners won't mind - and besides, there are collectibles to be found!
Other than simply because you want to be nice, there's an added incentive to resurrecting your teammates, too - points. While the game's certainly a co-op experience, there's a competitive element to it too, as you race to gain more points than your friends. Killing the same ghosts in a row will build up a multiplier, while resurrecting team mates, and finding collectibles will give your score a nice boost, meaning it's often a race to get to the person who's just been KOd.
In all honesty, though, the crazy amount of damage the enemies do is about the only bad thing about Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime. While more than the 12 included levels would have been nice, what's here is well done, and the levels fairly lengthy, with hidden collectibles providing an incentive to go back for a second time. At 800 points, it's a fair price, for what's actually a very good game.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
