Over twenty years after the last film installment, does the Ghostbusters franchise still have enough freshness to survive the transition into a videogame? Or is the franchise as stale as a musty old corpse?

Even if the proposed third film in the series languished in development hell for most of those two decades, fate must have been having a particularly great day when developer Terminal Reality and Red Fly Studios stepped forward to fulfill Zootfly’s ambitions. Despite the numerous hurdles this game has faced in getting to store shelves— including assembling the original creative team and stars, and being dropped and sued by former publisher Activision-Blizzard —the bona fide canon expansion to the Ghostbusters mythology has arrived.

Is it worth the wait? Is it worthy as the third entry in the series? And most importantly, is it enjoyable as a videogame?

Yes, yes, and yes, especially if you’re already a fan of the franchise. If you are not, I still believe the game holds enough magic to keep you interested and entertained throughout its six-to-nine-hour campaign.

Before this review goes any further, I need to comment on the differences between the multiple versions. This review concerns the Wii version specifically, though there will be comments about the other platforms’ as well. As far as story, dialogue, and overall progression are concerned, all versions are almost exactly the same; some versions have a couple added or subtracted lines of dialogue, but nothing major.

The PlayStation 2 version is based on the Wii version, and the PC version is based on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 build; however, both PS2 and PC suffer a bit from port-syndrome. And while Wii and PS2 offer splitscreen local co-op with no online functions, and PS3 and 360 have online competitive play and co-op with no local multiplayer, the PC version has neither, so that is something to keep in mind when considering your options. The release prices somewhat reflect these observations as well: the PS2 version is $20, the PC’s is $30, the Wii’s is $40, and PS3 and 360’s is the standard $60. My advice right now would be to buy both “flavors” of Ghostbusters if you have the opportunity, both on PS2 or Wii as well as on PC, PS3, or 360.

The Wii’s is the only current-gen version to offer local multiplayer, and it does so in the form of optional cooperative play throughout the entire campaign. This is very impressive, and while the framerate occasionally dips a bit more than while playing solo, the enjoyment is well worth it.

The Wii version also employs a much more stylized and cartoony graphical appearance than its HD counterpart. While I personally do not agree with some gamers’ assertions that any kind of realism is not for the Wii, I can appreciate what the developers were going for. The graphics are very clean and pretty effects are numerous, especially when using the proton pack. The framerate does occasionally fumble in single-player, and more often in multiplayer, and it does have some weird pop-in issues at times, but overall, it’s a very solid game graphically. Not the best-looking game on Wii, but enough effort was put into the presentation that it does not feel lazy.

Thankfully, resorting to the cartoony style allowed the developers to focus on the gameplay, and in this area Ghostbusters does not disappoint. The game is a third-person action game and controls as such; movement is handled with the analog stick on the Nunchuk, the Z button lays a ghost trap, different proton pack upgrades and the PKE meter are assigned to the D-Pad for easy switching, the B trigger fires your stream while the A button is reserved for the pack’s secondary functions. The 1 and 2 buttons bring up the menus, and the minus and plus buttons skip forward or backward in certain contexts, respectively.

Motion, or “waggle”, is kept to a relative minimum. You can thrust the Nunchuk while holding Z to throw the ghost trap farther, but this is optional. The only required use of motion controls is in capturing ghosts. When a spirit’s green health bar is whittled down by your proton pack, it is replaced by a red health bar. At this point, the stream becomes the blue “Capture Stream”, and the game prompts for Wii Remote thrusts in four different directions. At times, it gets annoying because it does require full thrusts and occasionally misses one, causing the stream to break, but the ghost does not recovers health unless the red bar is entirely empty, so you’re free to lock onto it and try again.

One divisive area of the controls is the camera: despite being a third-person action game, the camera is mapped to the Wii Remote pointer at all times, like in a first-person shooter. This is in contrast to other third-person games on the system such as Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, where the game controls the camera until you hold a button, at which point you enter “shooting mode,” and even then, you would use the Nunchuk analog stick to adjust your view. Of the two camps furiously arguing over which style is better, I fall on neither side. For a game like Resident Evil 4, the slower-paced style suits it very well. For a game like Ghostbusters, which has multiple ghosts and projectiles flying in all directions at once, having direct control of the camera helps out more than it hurts. You may find yourself occasionally wishing you do not have 100% control 100% of the time like I did, but that will fade once you get into some of the more hectic battles.

The story picks up three years after Ghostbusters 2, and involves Gozerian cults, spiritual mandalas, and Walter Peck. Amazingly, it seems all the key voice talent signed on, from four ‘Busters, to Janine, the Mayor, Peck, and even Vigo. The only noticeable hole in the cast is of course Dana Barrett, played by Sigourney Weaver, and she is very sorely missed. The game’s plot is much more influenced by the first film than the second, and this is a good thing if you liked the original better. In terms of humor, the game follows the film’s style very closely, so you will either find yourself cracking up at the one-liners or sitting there with a dead face (and for that matter, soul.)

Ghostbusters is around a six-to-nine-hour experience, not counting replaying missions for hidden content or on a tougher difficulty in order to unlock bonuses. This may seem like a criminally short amount of time, but remember that at least the Wii version is discounted a bit, and the PS2 and PC versions even moreso. Despite this length, if you cut out the gameplay and only focused on the story, you would be left with something that’s about half as long as each of the films, which is the reason there is no real character development or subplots. Even still, the world of Ghostbusters works fantastically well as a videogame and more aging film series (and Wii ports, as well) should receive this exact same treatment.

8 / 10