Ghostbusters - Multiplayer impressions

Wow – things have been hectic lately at the weekends (what with training courses, Gerry’s swimming lessons etc) and updates to my gaming blog seems to have taken a bit of a hit as a result! To make up for it, here are my impressions of the multiplayer portion of Ghostbusters on a weekday (this way, it only looks like I skipped one post!!).

The multiplayer itself is generally comprised of you and up to three other ghostbusters bustin' ghosts within a relatively small environment. There are several different game types which you can play. Some of them will simply be your team trying to catch as many ghosts as possible within the timeframe. Others involve you trying to either destroy or protect artifacts from the ghosts. And with the success of Horde mode on Gears of War, its nice to see a survival mode here as well where your team tries to survive waves of ghosts coming after you.

One of the things that the developers did right was to make the multiplayer co-operative in nature as you are always fighting ghosts. The only competition comes in the form of you trying to get a higher score than your teammates. This game just wouldn't work in a deathmatch type scenario and thankfully, the developers realized this.

Anyway, you may recall that I really enjoyed the game when I recently gave my impressions on the singleplayer portion of the game. Unfortunately, my thoughts on the multiplayer are much less ambivalent. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I think the multiplayer portion of the game is pretty poor for several reasons.

Feel – One of the things which made the singleplayer game stand out was how well the developers managed to capture the feel of the original ghostbusters movies. A large part of this was the characterization of the various ghostbusters. As I said in my previous post, the characterization is spot on.

However, as you might expect, the multiplayer game doesn't have any of this. Its simply you and three other people running around in a room blasting ghosts. Why is this a problem? In itself, it isn't.

The problem for Ghostbusters is that other games have done multiplayer superbly well. Just as when I was playing Rainbow Six: Vegas multiplayer, a similar situation occurred and I started to wonder – why am I playing this? Although the multiplayer wasn't bad per se, it just wasn't anywhere as good as the multiplayer in other games. Just as with R6:V, the strengths of this game don't match up well to how the multiplayer is structured. As I said before, it's a real shame that Ghostbusters doesn't have a co-op campaign mode.

Lag – The other thing which really bugs me about this game is that it suffers badly from lag. To give you an example, when I first started playing, I was pretty much always in last position and only managed to come 3rd in very rare circumstances. To be perfectly honest, I didn't think much of this at first as I was still learning how the multiplayer game plays and most of the time, the lag isn't visually noticeable (most of the time). However, its noticeable often enough that I decided to setup matches and let people join me instead of me joining them.

I immediately started to come first in pretty much every match I played. I'm pretty honest about my capabilities as a gamer. After years of playing video games, I know I'm not bad at them. I also know that I'm nowhere near good enough to be able to consistently come first when playing ranked matches online unless I have a significant advantage.