Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime review
Ghostbuster A: “This place is a maze.” Ghostbuster B: “Just keep blasting the bad guys and we’ll get out of here.”
The writers sum up their own game quite nicely. Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime is a dull, monotonous affair, not crippled by bugs or broken gameplay, but simply by bad design. It reeks of laziness, a cheap cash-in on a popular franchise with no real aims of its own.
SoS is a top-down arcade shooter that tasks you with cleaning out a variety of locations of various ectoplasmic types, tied loosely together by a generic plot about an ancient death-bringing god looking to make a comeback. The plot is told entirely by comic strips in between the levels and makes no impact on the game itself. Occasionally the four characters in your ghost-busting squad pipe up with some remarks during the levels, mostly in the form of quirky put downs or sarcastic comments on whatever locale they have to be in, but this effort to leverage in the humour that the series is known for falls a little flat, being mildly funny in some areas and irritating in others.
Combat is a small, focused affair at the start of the game, but these limitations make it increasingly boring as the plot progresses. There are three weapons: the famous Proton beam, the Fermion Shock and the Plasma Inductor. The first is a straightforward beam weapon, the second fires slowly but in an arc, whilst the latter shoots blue bolts that do more damage if bounced off the walls. These differences in the weapons seem to lay the foundation for some tactical thinking, but instead the game dictates your weapon choice by making each more effective against ghosts of a certain colour. If red ghosts arrive use the beam; yellow, the shock gun; blue the projector.
There’s not nearly enough variety in the combat since ghosts are doled out in waves as you enter specific rooms, and you’re forced to deal with them in exactly the same way over and over again. As you wade further into the game’s levels, the designers resort to throwing more and more of the same enemies down the barrel of your gun to create any sort of difficulty. Combat is quickly tedious and frustration follows soon after.
Level design in SoS is as linear as they come. More often than not the story doesn’t provide any sort of objective at the start of a level, such as reaching a certain location. Instead you’ll follow the path that the devs have laid out. Without fail the formula is as follows: fight; walk down corridor to next room; fight; repeat ad nauseum; boss fight. At the end of each battle a door will mysteriously open or a fire blocking the exit will magically extinguish itself, hardly disguising the fact that you are being channelled along a set path.
Even more annoying is the lack of any real direction: the path twists and turns through rooms and frequently cuts back on itself making it seem like you’re never actually going anywhere. “Remind me to get a map of the sewer when we get out of here.” is a quote from the obligatory sewer level and is uttered when you arrive back at the location at which you started the level. At that moment my opinions on the game moved from apathy to something approaching contempt.
Not only do the designers show a complete lack of ingenuity in the level design, they re-use these levels later on. This was annoying the first time, when the team goes back to a haunted hotel, but after I’ve revisited the sewers and the cemetery things start getting ridiculous. A little justification is wedged in by the narrative, but in some cases the developers can’t be bothered: the only reason you visit the sewers a second time is because the Ghostbuster’s van gets caught up in an earthquake and crashes down there. The vehicle levels preceding this are a necessary change of pace, but are even more linear than the normal levels and take all movement out of your hands, leaving just the shooting to do.
Multiplayer might have helped to make the game a little more bearable, but the PC version is cut back to local only rather than online. It’s the many decisions like this that make Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime so poor. The design is so consciously limited as if the developers thought ‘it’ll do’, rather than trying to rectify some obviously stunted gameplay that it’s hard to find anything redeeming to say about it.
“You know, it’s not so bad down here.”
I beg to differ.
