At Ghostbusters HQ you will get your orders. You don’t have to take every task that’s issued, but you’ll lose reputation points for the ones that you don’t. If you lose too many rep points, the game is over. Once you’ve accepted a task, you drive to the location in the Ecto-1, which is like controlling a sheet of plywood over a field of marbles.

It’s very cumbersome and unresponsive. When you run into an entity, you pinpoint it with the stylus and hold it on the creature to drain it of its energy. While you’re doing this, you will use the shoulder button to capture it in some kind of contraption. There are plenty of sci-fi weapons and gadgets at your disposal, although they basically do the same thing. These new devices keep the gameplay from getting stale too fast, but it does begin to decay quickly after the first half hour.

The money that you earn from successful endeavors can be used to research and develop new weapons and gadgets. Interestingly, you are never forced to use them, so you don’t really need them. At times you will have to switch to the other playable characters, and not necessarily because of their different skills but because of their courage-meter reading. The lower the meter level, the more apt they are to run away from the monsters. Control of team members is limited to a few simple commands such as “stop” and “go.” The A.I. isn’t very intelligent, and you’ll have to switch among them to ensure they aren’t getting killed. Switching requires using the stylus to select their portrait and pressing the B face button. When you’re busy in the middle of a fight, this is a very inconvenient method. Not to mention that some commands do not register at all, and other times the wrong commands are activated. What will happen is that you’ll go into a tapping frenzy in an effort to have the game issue the appropriate command, and this will only further complicate things. The icons are small and it’s very easy to hit the colored buttons that freeze characters in place instead of freeing them.

The cutscenes convey the Ghostbusters franchise as good as one could expect. They are filled with great graphics, great voiceovers, and movie-quality sound effects. The rest of the game has trouble living up to the cutscenes. In fact, the game has trouble living up to standards of a good DS game.

By Cole Smith
CCC Senior Writer