GhostControl Inc.

Seems like a rather nice casual TurnBasedStrategy game. Simple mechanics (for a turnbased veteran at least, but not too simple that it gets booring) that are still rather engageing and forgiving. Small quick maps, that can still potentially overwhelm you. It's not X-com: Ufo Defense or Jagged Alliance 2. (Or the newer ones: Xenonauts or JA: Flashback) but still lots of fun. The turorials are nice and clear. The random newscasts are somewhat entertaining :D I have not had any problems with it so far.

Tl:dr - Overall, this is a decent game, but lacks some of the tension and tactical flexibility that would make it great. Probably not worth the full sticker price. GhostControl Inc. is a turn-based small squad tactics game. Very small squad. You never get more than three people in your deployable team, and never wind up clearing any buildings larger than a three-bedroom house. The mechanics for laying and picking up traps is kind of cumbersome, but works in the framework of the game. The real thing that the game lacks is a sense of immediecy and danger; even the most gnarly of spectors will take several rounds to force one of your hunters to flee, and even mid-level spooks will themselves take several rounds of concentrated fire from your whole team to deal with. This really reduces what makes most turn-based tactical games exciting, being on-edge while waiting to see what the enemy winds up doing, since it could make or break you. Also, many areas have so much stuff scattered over such a small playing area that they are effectively reduced to networks of single-file corridors for movement, which is super frustrating.

Ever since that fateful incident with my neighbor lady's cat and a vacuum cleaner (sorry Cinnamon!), I've tried to find a healthy outlet for my ghost busting fantasies. Until now it has been fruitless. UNTIL NOW. "Ghost Control Inc." provides such an outlet. Part management sim, Part XCOM combat/base strategy, this is a fun little distraction of a game. You name your starting character (My guy is Fat Indiana... you'll know him when you see him) and start your own paranormal cleaning service (I named mine the Ghost Murderers). Time passes as you sit in HQ, upgrading, hiring, firing, and managing equipment - that is until your cell phone rings and your services are required. Then you load up your vehicle, prep your team, and head out; make sure to beat the competition there. Combat is deceptively simple. Your team opens doors, turns on lights, and encounters nasty ghoulies. Hit them with your lasers until they're worn down and lay down a trap. It's pretty satisfying to wreck ghosts in a fun, lighthearted atmosphere. Your team will suffer physical (and mental) wear-and-tear, so you'll have to swing by the hospital. Your car needs gas, so you'll get that too. And obviously as your business expands, the ghosts will amp up their game. You'll need to buy more equipment and hire new people. If you like XCOM, if you're a fan of management games, or if you have fond memories of a certain iconic franchise, I can recommend this wholeheartedly. I've just got one question: who ya gonna call? PS: Do NOT call the Ghost Murderers, they are highly unprofessional.

Only buy this game if its 75% off or more. You'll get 5 hours out of this game and I'll explain why. The game starts out fun. Its like a combination of the old Ghostbusters game (minus the ghost catching driving sections) for the 128K era mixed with X-Com. You can buy equipment, upgrade equipment, upgrade your HQ and buy new vehicles. So far so good, and then you relise thats it - the game is grindy and repetitive, and not in a fun way like Diable 2 There is little variety in the ghosts and their behaviour, the items don't really work as intended such as the beam weapons. You have a scientist who you can take with you to catch ghosts but they seem to be at a disadvantage so you just leave them at the base. If you've taken a look a look at the Kickstarter, you can see that 2 additional cities were funded, but there is just London in the game. I feel sorry for anyone who backed the game as they clearly didn't quite get everything they were promised.

If you enjoy Turn-Based Strategy, Ghost Busters and/or Business Management, there is no way I could recommend this game more highly than I do right now. Pros: Ghost Busters Simulator (but not so much like Ghost Busters it feels like plagiarism), a great depth of tactics and strategy afforded by different character classes (not so much) and a huge arsenal of weapons with varying abilities (this is what truly adds the depth of strategy), a decent amount of monsters that handle uniquely and require different strategies, decent replayability, great humor in dialogue and missions. Cons: Buggy achievements, certain combinations of enemies can lead one to feeling like it was a cheap defeat, eventually you WILL run out of things to do (and unfortunately this doesn't take a HUGE amount of time to happen), rather limited party (three in the field at any given time even though you can hire quite a bit more, there just isn't any reason too, especially since stats level up with character usage, it's rarely beneficial to use anything but the same 3 characters in the field.) Of course, pros and cons paints a pretty limited picture. This game has a lot of interesting systems and mechanics from weapon upgrades, vehicle upgrades and even base upgrades. There is a lot to do in this game and a lot to see, but most people will probably beat in a week with casual play times, a few days with more dedicated time and for the truly dedicated it could easily be beaten in a day. As much as this game is amazing, and especially with additional content currently in limbo as it's been some time since an update, I would only recommend this game at full price to people who are FANS of all genres this game caters to and fans of the Ghost Buster angle. For everyone else, I recommend waiting til this goes on sale. Personal Rating: 9/10 (charming pixel graphics, great audio, good controls, amazing game play and content.) Unbiased Rating: 7/10 (short "campaign", aka list of objectives, buggy achievements, unsure future for the game, steep-ish price for the amount of current content.) Also, my biggest gripe with this game is how ridiculously overpriced the emotes are, I want to collect them all!

In a nutshell, what you're basically looking at with Ghost Control is not so much a business simulation game but something more akin to an X-COM with a ghostbusters theme. Just like X-COM, you have to manage and upgrade your HQ, but the HQ management doesn't really require much careful decision making or strategy. It's more like just waiting until you have enough money to purchase a thing and then purchasing it. So there is base management, but it's not complex enough to really feel like a true business sim, and it's frankly not even as complex as the base management in X-COM. You're going to be doing a lot of tactical battles in this game, and this is another area where the game is basically similar to X-COM but a lot more simplified. You have 2 action points per turn, you fire ranged weapons that have a certain % chance to hit or not based on the particular character's aim stat, and your objective is always to eliminate all ghosts. Where it is different from X-COM is that there are pretty much only two weapons at your disposal: beam guns and traps. However the guns can have different effects (e.g. pushing enemies back, pulling enemies toward you, stunning enemies, multiplying dmg dealt by allies' beams, etc). The traps can also have a range of different perks (e.g. some traps require a ghost to be on the same square, whereas others have an AoE trap effect. Some traps can only be dropped next to you while other traps can be slung a short distance toward the target. Some traps only capture ghosts, while some traps can still stun or dmg a ghost even if failing to capture it, etc). One thing that is a notably creative feature of this game that makes it more interesting than X-COM or other similar tactical games is the ghost trapping gameplay. This is a truly original idea that in my opinion is the game's most interesting and defining feature. In a lot of these tactical games where you're controlling squads of dudes with guns, you're usually tasked with shooting all the enemies until they are dead or incapacitated. In Ghost Control, all of your enemies are ghosts, so you can't actually kill them. All you can do is shoot them to reduce their "energy level", which can greatly reduce their mobility if low enough, but it also makes them susceptible to being trapped. Your ghost traps have a "max energy level" requirement, which indicates the max energy level ghost it is able to trap. But lowering the ghost's energy level below this maximum makes the trap more likely to succeed. So what you are trying to do is shoot the ghosts to drop their energy level to 0, then position the ghost over a trap to permanently remove it from the field. But remember how beam weapons have certain effects, such as push/pull? This means you can throw a trap on the ground and hurt a ghost AS YOU ARE PULLING it toward you and onto a trap. Or an ally can throw down a trap and you can use a push-type beam to push the ghost onto an ally's trap. Or you can position a ghost on tap of a trap and hit it with a stun-type beam to prevent it from escaping the trap range and boost the odds of a successful trap. This is pushing/pulling ghosts onto traps to eliminate them is an excellent way of capturing the spirit of ghostbusters in a tactical game, and I commend the designers for thinking of it. One kinda negative thing about the combat is that many of the maps are very cramped for space. You'll be fighting ghosts in a lot of houses and offices, and it really limits your tactical options when the hallways or paths around furniture only allow one ally to pass through at a time. Based on conversation with other players, though, it seems that some people enjoy the challenge of having their mobility greatly restricted in this way. Another positive is that it also restricts the mobility of many ghosts (save for a few ghosts that will teleport or phase through walls). So it could be that you'll find that to be a positive, but just know that residential/office levels put you in VERY tight spaces. The designers realized that the residential/office maps are very cramped, though, so as a counterbalance there are also park/tunnel missions that are more about battling in wide open spaces. The negative of these tight spaces is not just how it affects gameplay/mobility, though. It also means that there is just a lot of.... STUFF... piled up on the screen. If you are using the default view on residential/office levels, it can be almost impossible to see your characters or where the possible walking paths are. There is some helpful tools in the game to cope with this. For example, walls and furniture become transparent when the cursor is within a certain range. You can also press shift to turn walls and furniture completely off. So there are ways of dealing with it, but some may still be slightly put off by the default view feeling so cluttered. In terms of the flow of the game, it does feel like it starts to run out of steam after several hours. There are objectives to meet, base upgrades to buy, weapon upgrades to buy, and of course the ghosts will become more challenging. But the game sort of has the same problem as The Elder Scrolls, where at some point you realize that the game basically boils down to 1) kill everything in dungeon, 2) sell everything from dungeon, 3) use money made from selling everything in previous dungeon to buy better things that let you kill everything in an even bigger dungeon, 4) repeat times infinity. If you love ghostbusters and you love x-com style games, and if you are fine with the old school look/feel, then it may be a game worth checking out. My verdict using the criteria below is that the game ranks around a 4.. 7) A classic, essential, and/or must-buy game that is worth full price. 6) A good game that is worth the full price. 5) A pretty good game worth checking out--especially if discounted. [b]4) A pretty good game, but I would recommend buying it discounted.[/b] 3) Worth checking out, but I would recommend buying it [i]heavily[/i] discounted. 2) Only worth checking out if you are [i]dangerously curious[/i]. 1) Avoid at all costs.

Essentially a modern day non IP related version of the classic Ghostbusters game from the 80s. Great music despite not having any of the actual tracks from the movie and the gameplay of running a "Ghost Control" business was fun. The only catch is that there isn't much meat to the gameplay either in terms of running the business or capturing ghosts. But it's a great foundation and something that I hope we see developed further or get a fully fleshed out sequel from.

+ Ghostbusters nostalgia + Cool retro graphics + Plenty of upgrades + X-com turn-based combat +/- Just a few things to buy for your base, therefore moving to a bigger building doesn't really do anything except to give you the illusion that you're getting bigger as a company +/ Insanity is a cool mechanic but instead of permanently limiting your character for the entirety of a battle (for example, by limiting your AP, or decreasing weapon damage) they become completely useless when the bar is (almost) depleted +/- Buildings can feel small and crowded, some of them not built with a few of the unlocked weapons in mind (weapons that require a certain distance before you can actually fire them) - A couple of gamebreaking bugs - Upgrading your crew not really worth it if you have to wait for longer periods, especially if they could go insane later on - Competitors don't really influence your business, feels underused Small note: the game would've been more fun if it was in 3D I think, giving you a better overview by using a rotating camera. But obviously I understand the decision to make it 2D, as it probably would've cost much, much more. [Rating: 81/100]

[h1]“Who you gonna call?” ~[i]Ray Parker Jr.[/i][/h1] In 1984, [b]Columbia Pictures[/b] released [b]Ivan Reitman[/b]'s masterpiece. Based on [b]Dan Aykroyd[/b]'s weird ideas, [b]Ghostbusters[/b] instantly became a worldwide phenomenon. And it was easy to see why. A star team of [b]Aykroyd[/b] himself, [b]Bill Murray[/b], [b]Harold Ramis[/b] and [b]Ernie Hudson[/b] drove around in that crazy-ass car based on ambulance conversion of 1959 [b]Cadillac Miller-Meteor[/b], hunted ghosts, tried to save possessed [b]Sigourney Weaver[/b] and fought giant marshmallow man in the end. Expensive FX and catchy soundtrack included. Everything about the movie was brilliant. And pretty much all of its elements became iconic. From memorable characters to unique ghost-catching tools, [b]Ecto-1[/b] vehicle, gluttony ghost called [b]Slimer[/b] and, of course, legendary theme song by [b]Ray Parker Jr.[/b]. Even if you're not really a fan of the actual movie, it's impossible to argue with the fact that [b]Ghostbusters[/b] is a very important element of popular culture. Naturally, video game adaptations were inevitable. And the first one appeared the same year on [b]Apple II[/b] and [b]Commodore 64[/b] computers, which were very popular back then. A bit later, it was ported to other popular platforms, including [b]SEGA Master System[/b] and [b]NES[/b]. And you know what? It was a very interesting game. Here. Said it. I mean, nowadays, the original [b]Ghostbusters[/b] game has a very bad reputation. Mostly because of all of those “angry” bloggers on [b]YouTube[/b], but also... Well, the game sure had its fair share of flaws. By no means it was perfect. [i]But[/i]. Think about it. We had an open world game. In which we were able to drive through [b]New York[/b] on [b]Ecto-1[/b], purchase new equipment and make money by hunting ghosts. [i]In a bloody 1984![/i] Say whatever you want, but personally? Even though I played the game a few years after its initial release, I was still very impressed by what it offered. And it wasn't just me. In 2006, it actually got a very solid fan-made remake for [b]Windows[/b] (you can get it for free on [b]Archive.org[/b]. It's just that. The idea of an open world ghost-catching game with the RPG elements was just way too cool to ignore. And what we have here? Is another proof of that. Because yeah. Despite its title, [b]GhostControl Inc.[/b] is an obvious nod to the original [b]Ghostbusters[/b] game. We have a city filled with ghost icons, we have a car that can run out of fuel, we make money by hunting ghosts and, of course, we can buy new equipment. Even design-wise it's an obvious homage. And it's not just for fun. Because the idea behind this game is to take [b]Activision[/b]'s old [b]Ghostbusters[/b] game and... I dunno, make it work? Like, for real? Because, while offering a lot of good, the original [b]Ghostbusters[/b] game never lived up to its full potential. A potential that the guys from [b]bumblbee[/b] tried to achieve here. Did they succeed, though? Well... kinda? I mean, personally, I used to think about something like this quite a lot. And what we've got here? Is pretty much exactly what I wanted. We've got proper headquarters, in which we can hire more personal and do researches, we've got different weapons and tools, we've got the ability to get new cars and, the best of all, we've got [b]X-COM[/b]-like tactical battles. And yes, I wrote “[b]X-COM[/b]”, since it's [b]MicroProse[/b]'s original I'm talking 'bout, not [b]Firaxis[/b]' remake. But I'll return to it later. For now, you just need to understand what we've got. And what we've got? Sounds abso-freakin'-lutely great on paper. Reality, though, has its own ways. And a brilliant concept not always lead to perfect gameplay. And this game? Like the old one, it's not as good as it was supposed to be. For many reasons. First of all, the visuals. Don't get me wrong, this game looks good. Reminds me a lot of [b]SimCity 2000[/b] and as a fan? I just can't not to like the graphics here. [b]Tassilo Rau[/b], who worked on graphics and animations, did a very nice job. The problem is – the graphics in this game kinda... prevent you from having fun. The city map is way too small, the zoom feature doesn't feel good, while tactical part? It can be one heck of a disaster. See, the tactical part includes a lot of micromanagement. You'll need to manually turn on the lights, open doors, throw and pick up traps and do other things like that. The problem is – retro-like approach turns all that into some sort of torture. Again, everything here is so small that you'll constantly need to use zoom and even then it'll be pretty hard to see. Remember that ship mission from [b]X-COM: Terror from the Deep[/b]? Let's just say that things are even worse here. Way worse. The environment will prevent you from seeing things and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't even rotate camera, which you'll regret all the time. Thanks to all that, you'll mess up a lot. And it doesn't feel good. Especially since you're not really allowed to mess up. See, the ghosts in this game are not just evil guys you're supposed to shoot. They're not even after you per se. Like [b]Slimer[/b] from [b]Ghostbusters[/b], they just want to have fun. And the thing they consider to be fun is to break as many things as possible. Naturally, your goal is to capture them before they'll destroy too much environment. Which can be pretty tricky since your employees are limited by their stats, there's no easy way for them to level up, you can't see what happens in the rooms that weren't explored yet (there are some tools to help you with that), etc. Should I say that limited graphics just makes all that much worse than it was supposed to be? Another big problem is the balance. Or the lack of it to be precise. You'll get the calls that offer new missions all the time (Got it? “Who you ganna call?”), everything takes place in real time, like in the original [b]Ghostbusters[/b] game you'll need to care about fuel, you'll need to pay your employees ([b]Jagged Alliance[/b] anyone?) and all in all, this game feels like you're supposed to do everything at the same exact time. The pace is all wrong and the natural flow is not even a thing here. There's also no proper story here. Which isn't necessary a bad thing, especially in this kind of computer games, bu-u-ut... Let's just say that in this exact one we can totally deal with more motivation to keep playing. Especially since what we get in the end is a plain “congratulations” message and there are no optional things to do. What really bothers me, though, is the fact that developers decided to abandon this game. They've promised more than one city to choose from on [b]Kickstarter[/b], they've kept promising that during the first couple of years after the initial release, there's an actual city selection screen in game, but... Nope. It's still London and only London. Like... seriously, guys? [i]Seriously?[/i] So, in the end, I just can't force myself to give this game a thumb up. But you know what? I feel really bad about it. Because I [i]do[/i] want to do that. On paper, [b]GhostControl Inc.[/b] is [i]the[/i] [b]Ghostbusters[/b] game I always wanted. Unlike many others, who were satisfied with 2009 game by [b]Terminal Reality[/b], I just kept dreaming of something like this. An open world game with tactical elements, headquarters, tools... [b]GhostControl Inc.[/b] does try to achieve [i]exactly[/i] what I wanted. And I do think that the attempt alone deserves a lot of praise. The problem is, I didn't really have fun playing it. My whole experience was, like, trying to get through some really annoying mechanics, poor UI (I didn't mention it, but yeah, UI in this game is way too old school and in this exact case it is [i]not[/i] a good thing) and poorly implemented visuals. And for what? For a boring “congratulations” screen? Don't think I can recommend anyone to do the same. Sorry.

I love the concept, and the equipment system and ghost variety is decent. But it falls very short in the execution department. You respond to calls by driving to their location on the map... but you need to keep your car gassed up to get anywhere, and there's only a couple of gas stations in the city, meaning you spend more time trying to just keep your car fueled than actually responding to calls. And then if you take too long an opposing company will respond and you lose your chance. Inventory/gear management was also a little obnoxious. I was disappointed at the end of the day. I was hoping for more base management a la XCOM and less driving around wasting money on a weird mechanic.