“A Fun Hang For A Few Hours” – Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord Review

“A Fun Hang For A Few Hours” – Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord Review

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Pulling a wand and down and readying it for action from its proton pack mount certainly feels like a confirmed return on the promise of VR. Long-running VR-focused studio nDreams’ new multiplayer co-op game Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord incorporates snazzy versions of all the standard ghostbusting gear into a fine use of the license, with digestible short-stint missions that rarely overstay their welcome.

Beyond that, however, some question remains over whether the game will effectively continue to capture attention in the months to come, and anyone strictly looking for a more grown-up Ghostbusters approach will likely pass on the game’s cartoony presentation and simplified combat routine.

Golden Gate Ghostbusting

“A Fun Hang For A Few Hours” – Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord Review

Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord’s story is mostly bookended around the randomized game missions, mostly delivered through in-ear conversations with a Ghostbusters regional manager named Gabby. The narrative revolves around some key mistakes committed by a former associate of the original Ghostbusters named Gustav Hookfaber, actions which offered clean energy to San Francisco, but at a critical cost. The city had previously been cleared of ghosts completely, rendering SF’s Ghostbusters HQ functionally useless, which has some predictable plot connection to Hookfaber’s energy research.

Now the HQ operates on a volunteer basis, with the player set as the newest unpaid teammate after responding to a podcast host’s call for assistance to his fans/believers of the paranormal. In this intro area, players will track down and equip the basic ghostbusting tools of the trade, like the PKE meter, ghost trap gun, and proton wand (strangely, we don’t recall actually picking up the proton pack itself). After wrapping things up and accidentally releasing the titular Ghost Lord, players are whisked back to SF’s GBHQ where, so long as the PlayStation 5 is online, an automatic lobby system will produce a gaggle of randos to prep for the next mission.

A Clean Cartoon Look and The Tools of the Trade

Ghostbusters Rise of the Ghost Lord Locker Skin

Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord looks pretty good on the PSVR2, with a nice level of detail and simple texture palette built around eye-catching particle effects and smooth animation throughout. Player character models effectively pop against the backgrounds, carrying more detail and an almost hand-drawn quality that gives them a sense of life, even if there didn’t seem to be many different skins running around our games. Character customization is restricted to equipping entirely different skins wholesale, and eye-tracking is visibly presented, even though finger touch detection never consistently registered; simply pulling the trigger usually worked well enough to turn our hand into a finger-gun pointer.

It can be pretty fun to wrangle larger ghosts with the proton wand alongside others before wrenching them into a trap or device. It feels, oddly enough, like a fishing game, and an overheat function lets players kick back additional damage through the use of a boson dart, a matter of a well-timed response to an onscreen button/sound prompt that felt satisfying and quickly became second nature. The basic tools present good recreations of their film counterparts, and the original trap gun device here looks particularly slick and sensible, a VR-oriented design that seems like it could realistically pop up in a show or movie.

Strict Teamwork Is Optional

Ghostbusters Rise of the Ghost Lord Review Proton Lasso

For the antisocial folks turning off their mics, they’ll find that Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord is simple enough to functionally remove most of the need to verbally communicate, for better and for worse. Individual missions feature various tasks which all revolve around battling and trapping ghosts, from the small nuisances which just need some steady proton beam focus to dissipate, onto larger specters that need to be chased, weakened, lassoed, and trapped. There can be a slight puzzle element in certain mission types – like fussing with levers and functions to fix a ghost-collecting machine in Harvester or tracking down haunted items to purge them in Exorcism — but every type of mission utilizes the same set of basics and can be accomplished in relative silence.

Co-op quality varied greatly in our time with the game, and a few uncomfortable lobbies prompted us to opt for some singleplayer missions as a breather, which match players up with a kind of spectral story-specific Ghostbuster character. These instances worked well enough, but it was generally harder to get her to rescue us reliably after being downed, and the lack of communication emotes meant that helping with mission tasks was a matter left purely up to the AI and what they felt like doing at any time. It’s not ideal, but worked well enough in some earlier missions.

The primary issue with the multiplayer lean of the game is that only rarely did it feel like we needed to coordinate with teammates. In most cases, they similarly pursued their own interests, which rarely prevented mission success, but could extend combat or prompt repeat tasks. So long as there were 2 to 4 of us steadily dealing with spawning threats and at least one person casually concerned with the objectives, levels would resolve, which promptly sends players to a weird lock-in scoreboard room and an eventual return to the HQ lobby.

On that last note, there were quite a few times when this post-mission area took up to three or four minutes to resolve, a relative eternity in VR among strangers. This doesn’t represent the only bug we encountered in Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, including some other lengthy load times, repeating tutorial audio, and a really infuriating moment where an item in the Ectoplasm mode phased through the floor and prevented mission completion. Sure, the levels are usually only ten minutes long, but that event resulted in a sacrifice of any cash rewards and a total waste of time, with the only option to quit out of the match entirely.

More Bugs and Multiplayer Snags

Ghostbusters Rise of the Ghost Lord Exorcism Mode

Theoretically, playing the game with actual friends seems like it would be the best bet, and the HQ area would probably feel less pressured as a result. Otherwise, a team of random players complaining or mouthing off the whole time about jumping into the next mission does not make tinkering with upgrades a very comfortable prospect. Players are free to disconnect a lobby to use the HQ in solo mode, but this just ends up adding even more load times, and greater potential for loading bugs.

After the game’s proper tutorial, early missions will usually prompt new tutorials manifesting as massive text boxes that obscure the space behind them, a truly odd and jarring design choice. Player revival requires another to give/receive a high-five, which sometimes worked by simply slapping a character model anywhere and other times was completely ineffective. Throwing items was never a requirement, but the gesture itself was very tricky to perform here and did not feel natural at all, and placing key items into highlighted areas to complete a task frequently did not activate on the first try.

Many of these are nitpicks, but they combine into a multiplayer game that doesn’t feel very united, and the spongy trappable ghosts grow spongier as the mission challenge revs up. The issue is possibly one of the Ghostbusters franchise itself: simply keeping an autotargeting particle stream on a ghost represents a fairly neutral action. Yanking them around is more interesting, but their blue “shield” bar must first be melted away to allow them to be lassoed, which sees players just steadily shooting them in pursuit while avoiding slow-moving projectiles or swipes from smaller mobs.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

Ghostbusters Rise of the Ghost Lord Review The Ghost Lord

This boils down to a game that feels a little lackluster and distracted at this early stage, which is arguably the most vital moment for a new multiplayer property. Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord has announced that new skins are forthcoming, as well as a “Slimer Hunt” mode, the latter of which is restricted to owners of the Full Containment Edition for an additional $20 (which also includes the Season Pass bundled in, seemingly the only way to acquire it). This brings the total cost to $55, which seems a few notches too high for a game with four basic mission types and a small set of maps which slightly change each round.

The ghosts and character design are perfectly fine, but also toe the line between a comic book and cartoon, lacking the tangible grittiness of the live action films or the horrific visages of many ghosts. And the Ghost Lord himself is a really simple and tonally odd design, like something from the cover of an old scifi paperback, rather than a tragic or deformed phantasmal creature.

Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord should be a fun hang for a few hours with a dedicated four-person squad, but it would have greatly benefited from a lower cost on PlayStation VR2, and even a four-pack discount would help. As it stands, it could use more content to justify its cost and some additional gameplay surprises to sell the franchise fantasy. There’s a good foundation here for a more inspired experience, and some mechanical adjustments to the gameplay could make the teamwork feel more like dreamwork. We’ll see whether the content rollout in the coming months keeps proton wands at the ready.

Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord is out now on PlayStation VR2 and Meta Quest 2/3/Pro headsets. A digital PlayStation VR2 code was provided to Screen Rant for the purpose of this review.