Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime

I never thought Sanctum of Slime would be as entertaining as the previous Ghostbusters game. Nevertheless, I wanted to pick it up since it looked like a fun and small game to pass the time with. If nothing else, the small price made it a justified purchase and I was sure the multiplayer would keep me entertained for a while. And heck, it's Ghostbusters! There's fun to be found somewhere!

I was dead wrong.

From the word 'go' I found myself disappointed in SoS's design. The "go to room, zap ghosts, go to next room" formula wore off once the second level started, not to mention the way you have to zap the ghosts. Ghosts in this game are color coded and you can only zap them with a weapon that has the same color. Where you'd expect this would bring a certain degree of tactics, it only brings tedium, particularly in Single Player. You see, the AI partners can't find their way out of a paper bag and more often than not use the wrong weapon. This also means that, when a room is particularly crowded with ghoulies, the AI can't reach you when you're down and end up KO'd themselves. It gets frustrating when ghosts one-hit you and the AI looks around, drooling and zapping blue ghosts with the red proton beam until they bite the bullet themselves. Only the driving levels are kind of exciting, if only because they mix up the gameplay a bit, going from on-rails on top of the car to on foot several times in a level.

The controls are functional, but only if you play with a controller. The way they handle keyboard and mouse controls couldn't be described better than 'dated'. It doesn't help either that you collide against your teammates. This lead to several situations during the final boss fight where I wanted to revive someone, only to be shoulder-bumped away from my buddy just because the AI felt it was better suited for the task. Of course it got killed shortly after.

Are there any redeeming qualities to this game for true Ghostbusters fans, then? Well, unless you find the fact that Janosz Poha has a nephew-turned-Ghostbuster equals riveting storytelling, I'd say no. The story is incredibly derivative and offers nothing new to the established lore. The team you play with are a bunch of rookies that, personality-wise, are poor carbon-copies of the original team. If only that meant the dialog was any good. The jokes are cringe-worthy, the banter is half-assed and it trips over just about every storytelling trope you can think of. They didn't even manage to get the sound of the proton beam right. It just doesn't pack a punch like it should.

Since the PC version only supports local multiplayer, I played through this game on my own. Maybe I would've added a star to the final score if playing with 3 extra buddies proved to even the odds against the onslaught of ghosts in way too tight rooms, but that's pushing it. But every game that instakills the player when they walk up to the final boss's idle hand deserves to be shot regardless.