Be ready to go on a ghost hunt! The Ghostbusters are back, but not with the characters we know so well from the movies. But you’ll still get to beat up the interior of the Sedgewick Hotel again though. Twice.
In Sanctum of Slime you control your character alongside the three partners of your Ghostbustin’ crew, either AI controlled, or with your friends in local or Xbox Live co-op multiplayer. You control the events in the game through an isometric view, which doesn’t always behave optimally – especially if you’re playing with a friend and you run in different directions, the camera can then have a hard time deciding which one to follow, instead of zooming out. Often you try to stick together as much as possible anyway, so it’s rarely an issue.
Story presentation is.. lacking
Seemed like Behavior Interactive or Atari hired a cartoonist to make a story to string the different levels together, and then they just animated the bubbles so they appeared chronologically – with no thought what so ever on font sizes and readability, and sometimes the bubble/text disappeared too fast so I couldn’t finish reading.
All this and dull background music quickly made me decide to just click through and and enjoy the gameplay, and forget about the story – which is a shame, as I really like to enjoy a good story, even if it’s full of cliche’s and stereotypes, yes even if it’s predictable, as long as it’s presented in an entertaining way.
You get introduced to the three settings of your weapon fairly quick. The proton stream is what you’d expect from a ghostbusters arsenal, but there are now also a fermion shock and a plasma inductor setting, which has to be used on the right type of monster. Clearly shown by the color of the monster, you know when to change the setting on your weapon and often the waves of monsters is a mix of different monster types, so you have to juggle between the different weapon settings. This dynamic works well and requires that you’re quick on your fingers in stressed situations.
You’ll quickly discover that most of the game you walk from one place to another, fighting ghosts. Like gladiators in arenas, fighting tigers and lions. All levels are finished up with a boss fight, and you’ll have to catch these bosses by throwing the trap, and then quickly tap the right combination shown on the screen. Are you playing with a friend or two in co-op, you don’t know who’ve thrown the trap, apart from seeing the trap being thrown from the character on screen, and you’ll have no chance of knowing who’s supposed to tap the combination, so make sure to coordinate.
Co-op is fantastic
The co-op experience is by far this games force if you have the opportunity to drag along a family member or your SO to be your wingman. This also makes it easier to complete some of the tougher levels as you don’t have to work with an AI that lacks brains. I would say that this is the games biggest fault or weakest link to say the least. You’ll always play in a team of four, as the game automatically ads the rest of the spots with CPU characters.
The game is a breeze when it comes to difficulty, apart from one level that can be quite a hassle to get through, and some gamers will need a wingman or two to help out. It feels like the QA team had gotten responses from game testers that the game was too easy to get through, and because of that, too short. So instead of adding some more levels to the game, they decided to crank up numbers of enemies and aggressiveness in one of the levels.
All in all, it was an entertaining experience, I’m still working on the last achievements, and I might start the game up again sometime, just to go through the story again – but this is definitely not one of my all time favourites.
