3/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Ghostbusters: The Video Game.

Oooo yeah baby, I love the smell of bargain bin game in the morning. The late 2000s and early 2010s were truly a funky era for Xbox 360 and PS3 games. Naturally, you'd get your big PS3 / Xbox 360 behemoths, but filling in the gaps were just a ton of middle-of-the-road releases that would slip through the cracks unnoticed. They'd just magically appear one day in the pre-owned section of GAME for chump change and skint 12-year-old Callum would be all up in that shit. Ghostbusters: The Video Game was the pinnacle of the bargain bin era. You couldn't so much as walk past the pre-owned shelf without seeing a lofty shrine of Ghostbusters: The Video Game copies amassing in the corner. It's weird, because while most bargain bin games kinda stink, Ghostbusters: The Video Game actually isn't half bad. It's a hyper-linear, seven-hour celebration of the Ghostbusters franchise, bringing back the cast and telling a new story complete with returning villains and plenty of old gags. Sure, every plot beat is purposed to be like, "DO YOU REMEMBER THE GHOSTBUSTERS... AHA, WE DO. HERE'S THE FUNNY SLIME GHOST. EAT UP YOU GREEDY BASTARDS," but Ghostbusters has practically been living off references to the original for decades now, so it's not like fan-service is new to the franchise... Above all else, it does what you'd expect from a Ghostbusters game. You get to bust ghosts with the big proton beam while Bill Murray tries to be funny in the corner. I can't say there's much more to it than that, but at least they got the main pillars down. Even when the game's bad, it's still pretty jokes. Like, for one, the Ghostbusters are endearingly incompetent. Throughout the entire game, I got downed 16 times. The rest of the Ghostbusters? They got downed a whopping 170 times... I'm not even exaggerating. It's incredible to just stand back and watch them do their thing, as the brave, beautiful bastards stand motionless in front of ghosts shouting trash talk before getting rag-dolled around the area. The final section has this comically big difficulty spike that makes their ineptitude all the funnier, essentially forcing you to sprint around every boss arena healing the Ghostbusters because they can't stand up longer than 20 seconds. The devs were clearly very chuffed they got the original cast on board too, because no one ever shuts up. That's fine if it's a story moment – the main attraction is the vocal talent, after all – but there's only so many times you can hear them berate you for crossing the streams mid-battle or go "NiCe oNE nEw kID" before you're like, Dan Akroyd mate, pipe down. It's as if the whole game is the compulsory driving section at the beginning of every modern Rockstar mission, except instead of Niko Bellic breaking down the ethics of war with a surprisingly articulate meth dealer, it's Bill Murray making pervy comments. The whole thing is just pure late-2000s, and as someone who played an unhealthy amount of linear third-person shooters I bagged second-hand for a fiver during that period, this was like visiting an old friend. I miss the days where you could pick something up on the cheap, play through its short campaign and then move on to a new thing days later. I'd love to say there's some deeper reason for that, but it's mainly because I have a gremlin brain that wants shiny new things every two seconds...