Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime Review

Posted By Shaun K. about 2 years, 1 month ago

Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime Review

2009 was a good year for the licensed game. While there were still plenty of duds, titles like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Ghostbusters went a long way to prove that a licensed property did not automatically have to be a kiss of death for a video game. While a big budget follow-up to the former is still pending, a smaller scale sequel to the latter has now arrived on XBLA, PSN, and Steam in the form of Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime. Does this four-player action game make bustin feel good, or does it cross the streams and obliterate any potential for fun?

Some years have passed since everyone’s favorite spook-hunting foursome had their last major adventure, and they are starting to feel their age. So, when a new wave of ghoulies and other nasties start making their presence known in the Big Apple, the call goes out for some fresh blood to hit the scene and help the guys out. Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime places you in the roles of these rookies on their first, very eventful, day on the job. A day that will take them from familiar haunts to the edge of existence itself. If all this sounds like just one more piece of bad fan-fiction, that is because it more or less is.

Like every other aspect of Sanctum, the story that plays out is a hastily thrown together affair, featuring poor writing, shallow characters, and one unfunny one-liner after another. The bulk of the story is told in the laziest form possible, namely voiceless still images done up in the style of comic panels, with said panels featuring art that tends towards the terribly drawn at best. Preexisting characters look almost nothing like their real life counterparts, while newer characters often seem to diverge wildly from their in-game looks. The new crew is utterly forgettable, while what little role the originals play, limited almost entirely to the cutscenes, tends to feel like a writer simply going through the motions and dredging up some well-worn character traits. The plot is a simple rehash of the movies, and by the time you reach the end of this so-called adventure, you will have little doubt as to why none of the original cast chose to lend their voices to this game.

Finding it hard to determine what’s going on in this picture? Welcome to Sanctum of Slime, folks.

As mediocre as the story of Sanctum is, the rest of the elements that make up the game are even worse. Run into a room. Get locked in said room. Proceed to kill all the enemies present so that you can exit the room. Then run into a new room and repeat. That basically describes 95% of Sanctum of Slime’s gameplay, and it, as you could imagine, gets old real fast. Compounding this problem is the fact that the game only has four levels (the hotel, the insane asylum, the sewers, and the graveyard), with each level being reused a second time, with only minor cosmetic changes being present to justify this, to further pad out the game’s play time. Combine a lack of gameplay depth with a lack of creativity in level design and you have a recipe for one of the worse playing games I have encountered in at least the last five years.

The game also employs a simple control layout: the left analog stick controls your character’s movement while the right analog stick aims and fires your weapons. Sound familiar? That’s because it is, and the action in Sanctum plays like any of the number of top-down shooters that have come down the pipes over the years. While simple does not automatically mean bad, the action in Sanctum is as generic and route as any game I have encountered. There is no attempt at variety, as the game features no puzzles or additional gameplay elements of any kind. Even worse, the game’s mechanics could have been slotted into any number of other licensed properties. Outside of the brief, and boring, quick time mini-game that is used to trap boss characters, nothing about the way this game plays does anything to capture the feel or essence of the license it employs.

This is from the second time you fight this boss. Because reusing levels was not enough for this game.

On the console side of things, Sanctum does indeed feature the much touted online four-person multiplayer (unlike the PC version, which requires players to huddle around the same screen due to the lack of even local LAN functionality), but all this really does is give you a chance to inflict pain on any friends, family, or strangers foolish enough to join you in slogging it out across the game’s brief three hour campaign. The multiplayer is clumsily implemented, lacking any kind of drop-in/drop-out functionality, and having four human players can lead to frequent lag and slowdown, no matter how good everyone’s connection speed might be. In the five games of multiplayer I played, I encountered such problems every time, while also running across game killing bugs twice. Inexplicably, for some reason the between level cutscenes that tell the majority of Sanctum’s story are not present in multiplayer. Since the story, for all its faults, was easily the best part of the game, this choice helps to sap what little fun might have been present in Sanctum’s multiplayer gameplay.

The game rounds out its design by employing a color-based system where the red blaster does more damage to red enemies, the yellow blaster does more damage to yellow enemies, and the blue blaster does more damage to blue enemies. Yet this system is so poorly implemented into the overall game, the developers probably would have been better off not bothering to include it. While matching colors can make the game a little easier, I was able to blow through much of the game in single-player, as part of a vain attempt to add some excitement to the game, using only my basic red proton wand. The color-based enemies and weapons feel like little more than a tacked-on element at best. Also, many of the colored enemies, especially the smaller blue ones, can look so much like your weapon fire that it can be difficult to tell what you are actually shooting at.

The game’s two on-rails, vehicle-based levels are probably the closest Sanctum comes to actually being fun.

Speaking of Sanctum’s visuals, the game’s graphics are of as poor a quality as the rest of the game. Character models are stiffly rendered at best, with enemies being limited to only a handful of ever repeating designs while human characters fare even worse. Also, the levels tend to look like they came right out a first year computer design student’s homework assignment. Worse of all, visually speaking, the game’s fixed overhead camera is so high up that it can often be nearly impossible to decipher the action that is occurring on screen, particularly in the game’s darker and/or more fog-filled levels. The music is utterly forgettable, with the famous Ghostbusters theme song being limited to the game’s opening screen and closing credits. There is absolutely no voice work of any kind, but considering how poorly done everything else in this game has proven to be, this is probably a blessing.

Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime is a disaster of a game on every level, to the point that I am amazed that Atari even bothered releasing it to the market. Even bad licensed games can often feature something of value for the hardcore fan base if no one else, but not Sanctum. Ghostbusters fans should join the rest of the gaming community in avoiding this title at all cost. Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime is easily among the worst products the Ghostbusters franchise has ever produced. It is a horrible title and one of the least enjoyable gaming experiences I have ever suffered through. Avoid this game at all costs.

A review copy of this game was purchased by the reviewer. The reviewer spent approximately six hours playing the game on Xbox Live Arcade and completed the main campaign in both single and multiplayer.

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