You slowly crawl through a hall full of fish and other sea creatures. Museum visitors stand in front of the windows and look at the information boards. Suddenly, the bucket with the mop next to it moves slightly. It was as if someone had pushed an invisible foot into him. But now your cars are flashing and beeping and you know the bucket is actually haunted.
What follows is a fight with a pink monster, trying to catch it and getting frustrated with it licking your gear. And it all starts over, until the trap finally slams shut behind her.
In the new asymmetric co-op game Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, you can play as four Ghostbusters, with a fifth player taking on the role of a ghost. The task is simple: the ghost must scare as many visitors as possible, take possession of as many objects as possible and escape from a gang of four chasing him.
He has different options at his disposal – he can teleport through the multi-colored cracks in the walls of the museum or, perhaps, call for little helpers who, together with him, scare others (and also cleverly distract). On the other hand, the Ghostbusters have in their hands the proton weapon known from the series, with which they bind the ghost, and if they fail, they catch him in a special trap.
At Gamescom in Cologne, I had the opportunity to try both roles. I started out as a ghost trying to escape IllFonic founder and studio head Charles Brungardt and lead developer Jared Gerritzen. The game is very simple and you will understand the controls in a few minutes. We started from the hall of the mentioned museum, where there was also an exposition with dinosaurs and a recreation area. The stairs led to the second floor nearby, but I never got lost and the places were not confused.
There are countless things around you to obsess over – in addition to a bucket, there is also a drinking machine, an innocent-looking chair, or even a starfish. Once possessed, the pink spirit disappears before the hunters’ eyes… and only their devices can track it.
At first, the game was relatively calm. Me and a couple of developers, complemented by two AI-controlled characters, moved carefully around the museum, trying to guess the opponent’s next move. It almost resembled the famous library scene from the first film, which the filmmakers called their target.
But over time, the tamers managed to close the rifts, limiting the possibility of reviving the spirit after its short capture. In the meantime, the horror of the museum visitors was growing and the needle was approaching a tempting maximum, but so was the intensity of our collisions, slime was flying everywhere, and finally my poor spirit was caught. Lapen – not killed. Tamers can’t die either, and licks only take them out of the game for a short amount of time, which is a welcome change.
The American studio behind the game, IllFonic, has titles like Friday the 13th: The Game or Predator: Hunting Grounds. There’s no denying his love for 80s movie titles. But unlike Predator, which didn’t really excite me personally, Ghostbusters is pure entertainment. You’re sitting at home with friends, eating or drinking something very unhealthy… and then you think of a quick party. Ghostbusters doesn’t take long, we managed two matches in a roughly twenty minute session with the devs. Without any critical connotation: a very pleasant name for parties.
Playing Tamer is quite different. While as a ghost you have fun thinking up all sorts of ways to annoy the people around you, as a hunter you have to work together with your colleagues. You overtake each other, help each other with traps and try not to cross the beams. The cooperative component here works very well – the soloist will not go far.
This is what I learned in the second game, when Gerritzen took on the role of the ghost and Brungardt and I chased after him. Even before that, I was chatting with Ray and Winston in the lobby of the firehouse, who were actually voice actors Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson. If I wanted to, I could customize the appearance of my tamer or tamer and we would choose from a wide variety of cards and spirits. The creators chose a brewery to demonstrate, and again an almost cinematic scenario followed: sneaking, random skirmishes, adrenaline ending.
Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed may not have the prettiest graphics (however, they look worse in photos than in motion) and in some moments you just frantically press the buttons, but at least in my case the game worked perfectly with pacing and gradation. This time we caught the ghost with five seconds left and cheered and cursed each other like we were friends. The game was fun, almost familial and, above all, subconsciously brought people together.
The game releases October 18 for PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
The Gamescom 2022 report on ZING.cz features Acer Nitro gaming laptops with processors up to Intel Core i7.
Source :Indian TV
