Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime Review

Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime is the newest release from Behaviour Interactive in which you must use your Proton Pack to kill a multitude of different coloured ghosts and ghouls. Can this arcade-style game really live up to the Ghostbusters name or will it leave with a dial tone?

Sanctum of Slime consists of 12 levels where you and three others (friends or, if you’re like me and have none, AI’s) go from room to room destroying three different coloured ghosts ‘n ghouls using three different attacks corresponding with said colours. Sounds fun, right? Wrong.

When I first started to play Sanctum of Slime, I did actually enjoy it. It starts with a comic book style cinematic which explains that a demon under the name Dumazu is resurrected in modern day New York, which causes ghosts and ghouls to be drawn to New York from all over the planet. You then get into a level and use your Proton Pack to kill ghosts. As you progress through the levels you get different types and colours of ghosts, and the different weaponry in order to destroy them. By the third or fourth level, you have got the maximum of three weapons and from then on everything gets a bit repetitive. You must then continue on through all the levels firing your weaponry at these ghosts which, I will admit, did get quite hard and frustrating at times but all in all was very samey and dull.

Just like any old-style arcade game, it’s always more fun with friends and this is true with Sanctum of Slime. If you’re on a console then it’s okay, you can jump onto Xbox Live or PSN, grab three friends and shout it out over coms whilst seated comfortably on your sofa. Sadly, if you have a PC you can’t have online play. All you have is local which would be okay if you had three controllers as well as the keyboard and the space to hold three more people around your screen but in most cases, you don’t. A big disappointment and a bad move from Behaviour Interactive I think.

Speaking of the controllers with the PC, I got very confused whilst trying to use mine whilst playing on the PC. I booted up the game, played with the mouse and keyboard for a bit but then decided to use the controller. I plugged it in, went to play it and nothing. Eventually I found that you have to close the game completely and reopen it whilst the controller is plugged in, to use it. Not good.

As it’s hard to play with three friends on the PC, you will inevitably get stuck with the AI (the same goes for consoles if you play single-player or can’t find three people). Now, these AI aren’t all bad, they usually fire in generally the right direction and will revive you if you are downed faster than a friend (human players must spam a button to revive a downed player) but after a while, I just found that they got in the way. They would run in front of the enemies more times than I could count or all huddle in the corner and shoot at one enemy at a time. This wouldn’t be so bad if you could shoot through friendly players but you can’t so the one at the back was rendered useless.

Overall, I found the game disappointing. It was fun at first but then there was nothing new as you progressed. The boss fights are pretty simple and the level design was dull and dreary. I ain’t afraid of no ghost, but best to leave them to themselves on this occasion.