Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed Review (PC) – Bustin’ Makes Me Feel (Mostly) Good

Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed – Initial Reaction

Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed kicks things off with the iconic theme song and this is certainly a very powerful way to be brought into the game (even if streamers should undoubtedly have this initial part of the game muted for copyright safety). Hearing the theme song did, in fact, and to a rather sad degree, already do a pretty good job of winning me over to this. – Say what you will, but Ray Parker Jr’s ‘Ghostbusters’ theme song is an absolute banger (even if it did lead to a lawsuit from Huey Lewis – Click here if you were unaware of that!).

Just covering the game’s music in general, however, with it predominantly featuring original scores, everything still generally feels in keeping with the Ghostbusters films. Albeit predominantly due to the fact that most of them sound a little similar to the original movie’s soundtrack. It’s a solid move though.

As you might expect with any gaming title these days, however, the first 30 minutes or so of gameplay is predominantly taken up by a tutorial teaching you the very basics of hunting ghosts. – Fortunately, the tutorial does go quite smoothly, albeit, it is more broken down into somewhat minigame sections rather than getting you to do more practical exercises (such as in Dead by Daylight). Overall, despite having a tutorial, when you get into the actual game (as a Ghostbuster) you’re still not entirely 100% sure what you should be doing.

Making You Feel At Home

Your home of operations, general character editing, customisation, and all other general off-the-clock exploration primarily encompasses two locations. The iconic Ghostbusters firehouse, and Ray’s Occult Book Store (which is now apparently next door to the fire station). – And this does raise a point I should touch on briefly. Although the game slightly shies away from making it overly clear where you are canonical/timeline speaking, it seems pretty clear that this game is set after the events of not just Ghostbusters The Video Game (2009) but also the most recent film release, ‘Aftermath’.

And speaking of fan service, if you want it, it’s here!

Both Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson appear in the game reprising their (voice) roles as ‘Ray’ and ‘Winston’ respectively. In this regard, it’s fantastic to see these two back in what is arguably their most ironic characters, but at the same time, it does also kind of make you lament the lack of Bill Murray in this title (for reasons unclear), and, of course, the sadly passed Harold Ramis.

It isn’t all great though as while the character model for Winston looks fantastic, the less said about Ray the better. Yes, he’s obviously not getting any younger, but look at that screenshot above and tell me you instantly recognise that as Ray Stantz. I don’t want to sound mean, but I think it looks like some kind of dollar-store version of Dan Aykroyd.

And in this regard, character models in the game are a bit, well… Weird. A lot of them (including the actual playable characters and ghosts) have a bit of a cartoonish style of drawing (almost like Borderlands) which, when placed in the highly realistic environment, does come across as a bit of a clash. – We should note though that in terms of cosmetics, this might be a somewhat deliberate choice as there are more than a few homages to ‘The Real Ghostbusters’ cartoon series.

As you might expect though, exploring the fire station gives you plenty of nods to the film franchise and will quite possibly gobble up your first hour or so of gameplay as you explore it. You have the iconic Ecto-1, the containment unit underground (minus an Oliver Peck attempting to shut it down), and even the dancing toaster (from Ghostbusters 2).

They haven’t gone overkill in terms of fan service, but like Ghostbusters Aftermath, there’s enough here to make any franchise fan feel thoroughly at home and rooted in the lore.

Playing As A Ghostbuster

After the relatively brief tutorial, and the character customisation screen (of which there are plenty of gadgets and cosmetics to unlock) the game takes you straight into the action of playing your first ghost-hunting mission.

The mechanics of Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed are fairly straightforward. Working as a team of four, you must remove all of the ghost ‘presence’ from a location. If you don’t do this quickly enough, the location becomes overrun and the spirit world wins. Simple enough right?

How do you actually remove the ghost from the location though? Well, you do this by closing three rifts into the spirit realm. Then, with the main ghost now having no point of further access or escape, you trap them resulting in a win. – You are, of course, free to (eventually) play as the ghost or, indeed, against another person or bot playing the evil entity. In this regard though, it needs to be said that even the worst human player is probably going to be twice as effective as the AI in this game!

While the ghost can be trapped at various points during gameplay, this doesn’t result in the round instantly ending. It’s more of a temporary hindrance to the ‘enemy’ character in specifically preventing them from actively moving the ‘haunt’ meter up for while.

In a nutshell, though, the round isn’t over until all of the three rifts have been destroyed and you do a ‘final’ capture on the ghost. – It sounds simple, but honestly, it’s actually rather involved.

While your main mission is, of course, to capture the ghost, there’s a lot more going on than just this. Various NPCs wander around the location and if the enemy ‘scares’ them enough to force them to leave the property entirely, this will result in the ‘haunt’ meter going up instantly by 5%. – So, how do you stop this? Well, you essentially talk to people, hit skill checks, and ultimately reassure them that you’re on top of the situation (think of Bill Murray placating the hotel owner).

And this pays off too as if you win them onboard enough to your cause, if see the ghost they’ll ping your screen to let you know its location.

While this might all sound like fun though, and it mostly is, that doesn’t mean to say that playing as a Ghostbuster is perfect. – Starting with the AI and bots, they’re all pretty useless so far as I can tell. They won’t actively help or come to you when you need them (unless you’ve been slimed), and they constantly seem to throw out traps even when there’s zero prospect of actually catching the ghost.

This needs to be played with other real people. And better still, people you can have voice chat with because if you’re four lone wolfs rather than a functional team, I think the ghost will probably end up winning 9 games out of 10.

Another slight grumble comes down to your proton pack. – I love how they’ve retained the reload (cooling) mechanics from Ghostbusters The Video Game, but the beams do have an exceptionally limited range that’s really hard to accurately gauge. For a lot of the early part of the game, you’ll be needlessly blasting (and heating up your pack) because your target is just a couple of meters out of your range, but with all those bright lights flashing, you have very little concept of just how close you actually are to hitting the ghost. – Overall, it’s cool, but definitely needs some fine-tuning.

Playing As a Ghost

You must walk before you are able to run, and Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed takes a similar approach when it comes to playing the ghost. – What I’m trying to say is that while you might want to jump into playing the antagonist, Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed does require you to at least get a handful of rounds as a buster under your belt before it’ll let you loose in spirit form.

Between the two options though, the ghost isn’t just a lot more fun to play, but in truth, it’s quite significantly easier too.

Your role as the ghost is notably more straightforward. Avoid being trapped (if you can), protect the rifts (when you can), and in the interim, hinder the Ghostbusters while attempting to scare the public enough so they’ll leave the building. All going well, you’ll get your haunt meter to 100% and win the game.

As a ghost, you do have to play through a tutorial, but this is thankfully (once again) quite brief and actually does a much better job of giving you all the core mechanics you need to know. I do love the concept as well of a possessed copy of ‘Tobin’s Spirit Guide’ being your access to the underworld.

The more you play, the more access you get to different ghosts who all have differing abilities (and yes, Slimer is here!). In this regard, I only got to play with around two in my playthrough prior to writing this review, but I genuinely found the ghost to be massively more entertaining than a Ghostbuster which, in comparison, I tended to find fun but with interspersed with regular bouts of frustration.

And in this regard, I can see a potential problem with Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed. – I just can’t help but feel that outside of playing with friends, most solo gamers are going to prefer being a ghost. My opinion might change in the future, but I just think the ghost is more fun, and when you lose, you don’t feel quite so bad about it!

Plus, the fact that I didn’t need to write nearly half as long to explain the ghost indicates that, overall, it’s just a lot simpler to grasp.

To give you a quick idea of how I feel the ghost is just easier to play though, I had one round against a clearly quite well-organised team. Within around 4 minutes, they’d already destroyed all of my rifts. My haunt meter was only at around 16%, and should they capture me, it was game over. – Against all apparent odds, however, I was able to successfully escape them for well over 10 minutes despite the fact that they discovered me (or more accurately my hiding place) on at least a dozen occasions.

The haunt meter filled up, and I won. And remember what I said earlier about frustration? Well, yeah, I imagine that team was pretty pissed off that I’d managed to effectively juke them for the entire round. – I certainly felt pretty epic about the whole experience. Them though? probably not so much…

How Does It Run? – PC Optimisation

Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed is available on all major consoles, but this review is specifically of the PC version, and, traditionally speaking, this is usually the port that gets the roughest treatment. Fortunately, in this regard, Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed runs really well. Yes, I had a couple of loading stutters here and there (which can undoubtedly be resolved in a patch), but overall, the PC version seems well-polished on release day.

With that being said though, we do hit a wall when it comes to ray tracing. Put simply, if you plan to have this feature enabled, you’re going to want a good RTX graphics card to handle it. The specifications recommend an Nvidia 2070 or above, and I daresay that the more ‘above’ this you are, the better your experience of it will be.

I played this with a 2060 SUPER which I’ll openly concede now is ever so slightly below the recommended ray-tracing requirements. With that being said though, with ray tracing off, it ran phenomenally well. With it on though, every time I fired up my proton pack, the framerate tanked to an outright jittery performance (and the less said about when all four players were firing, the better!).

While it’s likely that this both can and will be optimised in both Game Ready GPU driver updates and patches for the title itself, unless you have something like a 2080 or 3060 Ti, I’d probably recommend you leave the ray tracing off.

Otherwise, though, it ran great, and it’s very rare I can say that for a PC game on launch day!