Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed

 Stirring spirits.

I'm about to sin right now, right here for everyone to read. I don't care for Ghostbusters. Never did. I mean I don't think they were bad movies by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think they're pinnacles of entertainment worthy of coming back to time and time again for nearing on forty years now. The first film was fine, as was the second, but I don't understand what would have been so terrible about leaving it at that. A funny movie about exterminators who capture ghosts which they turns into their business model. Good joke, it stood up until the credits. I never understood why there were no less than two cartoons made for the concept, nor two revival movies made decades later. But they were, indeed, made and to this day Ghostbuster fans still regularly gobble up near every bit of trivia and lore they can around what I see to be a paper-thin world, all for the hopes of propagating this piece of mid-eighties cheese into perpetuity.

But I can't deny the success the brand has seen, nor the apparent fanbase it has managed to drum up. Aforementioned spin-off cartoons that were actually pretty good, some games that really set the fanbase ablaze, a few that didn't, and a Ghostbusters VR title that was such a flop that the team just cancelled all content for it so quietly that I can't find a single news article noting its absence. They just stopped releasing the promised 'several' episodes after number 2 and just walked away. And now, hardly a wink after the last movie, we have yet another Ghostbuster video game to stir up the old fanbase from their retirement homes because 'Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed' was surprise announced and it's a- it's a asymmetrical multiplayer title? Oh no... that could be bad.

Now to be clear, asymmetrical multiplayer isn't a guaranteed recipe for disaster by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact the genre has something of a dedicated and loyal fanbase that are all currently taking turns to fund the development of Dead by Daylight. Sometimes they find other games to keep them busy for a week or two, but they'll be back to DBD before the month's out. Truly that game managed to find its indie footing when sure-fire, multimillion dollar, too-big-to-fail, 'Evolve' let the ball drop. Surely there's some space in there between abject failure of 'Evolve' and the typical flash-in-the-pan DBD distractor where another title can rule the roost at least for a little while. At least that's what Austin-based developer IllFonic is hoping for.

If you think that you recognise that name then it's probably for good reason. Illfonics didn't just pop up out of the ground and, somewhat encouragingly, this isn't their first rodeo with working on an asymmetrical multiplayer game. They worked on the Friday the 13th Videogame which helped launch a wave of indie horror asymmetrical games forever more. Quite a simple game on the face of it, but igneous in it's premise. We'd all seen the idiot survivors in these horror movies make nonsensical, near-suicidal, choices, so why not try and find out exactly how well we'd do in those shoes making those decisions? It came with considerable degrees of jank, both in server stability and plain gameplay balancing, but that ruggedness carried an approachable charm to it that a polished competitive game of this genre, like DBD, just doesn't. Horror is perhaps the only genre in entertainment that can successfully and consistently pull off the jank-look.

Of course the goodtimes couldn't last forever and following a lawsuit IllFonics were forced to drop the game to search for greener pastures. Still that's quite some Venn diagram crossover for this current Ghostbuster project, isn't it? An asymmetrical and a horror game: It's like they were priming up for a Ghostbuster's game all this time. (Not that Ghostbusters is really a horror franchise, so to speak. But ghosts and horror are adjacent to one another, I suppose.) I wonder if they have any other priors that might clue us into their development prowess. Let's see here- they also made... oh no. They made 'Predator: Hunting Grounds'. Talk about a swing and a colossal miss! That was a game which took the rough charm of that last game and totally lost it in abjectly awful balancing, an uncommitted and boring play loop, and a raw gameplay spread that made the hands weep for even the days of Wii FPS games. And yes, I played a great many Wii FPS', I know how bad they all felt. If I'm thinking back fondly on the days of trying for prestige on COD 4 for Wii (No I didn't get there, but I was painfully close) then you know you've screwed up somewhere along the way.

Which pretty much sums up the potential I feel that a Ghostbusters asymmetrical game could have, between those two priors. Either we're looking at an abject disaster or a small hit briefly noticed and quickly lost to the abyss of copycats or more stable genre tentpoles. This subgenre of competitive multiplayer games might not be quiet as oversaturated as some others, but that's just because these sorts of titles have a limited shelf life and an initial appeal that doesn't lend itself well to sustained and continuous play. When you accept that baseline, and then reflect on the value that the Ghostbusters brand in particular lends to this franchise, then the dream slowly starts to unravel and you see why games like this don't particularly appeal to people like me. I like investing in online games with a journey ahead of it, and I don't see that journey in Spirits Unleashed.

All the ingredients are there however. The game touts the ability to create your own Ghostbuster, interact with two out of the original cast for their vendor abilities, and will have basic ghost hunting gameplay. I doubt those hunts will match the unburnished ruggedness of a popular ghost hunter like Phasmophobia, but tracking down spectres is inherently a formula that can hold some unique challenge from spook to spook, depending on how creative the team is with their rooster. The art style has this cartoony false-life look to it that fits the soft-edge horror that Ghostbusters encompasses. But it all lacks that spark of something special, that promise of something greater, that hook to feed the ravenous hunger of the online addict. It just feels so incredibly insubstantial.

Yet all I say must be consumed with the requisite amount of salt. I am no Ghostbusters fan and the last asymmetrical multiplayer game I played was, in fact, Evolve. (I got a little too good at being the monster in that game. No one should play Evolve that much.) Still, I am someone who observes the medium well enough to be able to predict the life and death of games like these with a decently high hit-rate when it comes to accuracy. Is this the Ghostbuster game that fans have been rubbing their hands together for? Perhaps, although the response certainly doesn't seem so excited as to imply that. Most likely this will last the breadth of a summer fling, come and go in space of a quarter rotation and never be thought of again. Hey, at the very least I expect the thing to be more supported than that abominable VR title.