Sense before starting: I'd heard a lot of good things from gamers particularly on Twitter.  I'm also a huge fan of the movies, so while I'm normally skeptical towards movie-video games, I had high hopes for this one

Owned/Borrowed/Rented:  Owned.  I bought it on 360, though I had initially debated opting for its PC counterpart.  When I found out that the PC version did not feature any of the multiplayer gameplay, I decided to go with the 360 version.

Play again? I've had two rather intense gaming sessions so far.  Definitely going to finish the story mode and then explore more of the multiplayer options.

Thoughts

Before I get too verbose, I will state that this game is fun, funny, entertaining, beautiful and frustrating in an unirritating way.  I find it amusing that after posting what is essentially a rant about checkpoint save systems, Ghostbusters uses this exact system.  Fortunately, they've done it right and it makes sense in this action game.  I'll first look at the single player which I've played extensively during my sessions and then touch briefly on the multiplayer modes that I tried.

The game is set some time after the movies.  You encounter Stay Puft (the giant Marshmallow man) again, but part of the story is finding out why exactly he is back since he had already been defeated by the Ghostbusters.  You play The Rookie, a new cadet joining the Ghostbusters squad.  By assuming this kind of role in the game, it makes the training and explanations both bearable and logical.  For someone who's watched the movies, it's pretty cool that each of the original Ghostbusters has the original actor doing the voices.  I know that some reviewers and gamers have complained that Bill Murray's voice acting is rather lackluster, yet in my opinion he is just assuming the role since Venkman was a rather dry man in the movies.  So all is well in the voice acting department - more so than the average game!

A lot of the scenery is quite beautiful in the game.  So far I have visited the Ghostbuster HQ, Times Square, Hotel Sedgewick, the many, many levels of the library and now I've moved onto the museum.  A lot of the other dimension scenery is hauntingly beautiful.  The ghost effects, sounds and music have all been effective in making me a little scared as I walk around these haunted places.  The controls are fairly straightforward, but some of the default controls aren't intuitive for me, though I have yet to change anything if I can.  Sometimes in a panic I end up using the wrong device or doing the wrong thing, but I think that's more a matter of my acclimating myself to the game as opposed to any fault or mistake made by the developer.

Like most games, there is a subtask, if you can call it that, for collectors.  Using your PKE meter (a kind of radar for all ghostly things), you can track down hidden artifacts - cursed artifacts - as well as scan the ghosts you encounter for the spirit guide.  There are achievements tied to both of these functions, so it's up to you whether or not you do that - it's not mandatory.  Scanning ghosts can be useful, however, since it lets you know the ghost's weaknesses and attacks.  I try to be completionist when I play a game (which can ruin my fun in most games), but it's actually been enjoyable in Ghostbusters.  The artifacts are funny mostly and there are usually ghostly noises coming from them, so they tend to be easy to find.

There is no "death" in the game from the player's perspective.  You or the other Ghostbusters can end up knocked out in which case you just need to run up to them and hit "A" to revive them.  Unfortunately, this has become a significant annoyance, though not so significant as to turn me off the game.  It seems to me that my partners get knocked out a little too often.  They also only rush to revive me, yet can be standing right next to a downed team member and won't do anything until it's clear I'm not coming or can't come because I'm knocked out myself.  They'll even run all the way over to me to revive me, leaving their partner knocked out.  I don't know if this is a flaw in the AI or a conscious design decision.  If everyone is knocked out, then it's "Game Over" in which case you just restart from the last checkpoint.  Since you tend to only fail during boss encounters, you just restart at the beginning of the battle.

Since the above paragraph was the only real annoyance, I'd say Terminal Reality has done a fantastic job with this game.  Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis are to be thanked for the fantastic writing.  At times, the dialogue can be a bit much, but I think that's more a matter of personal preference than anything else.

(Boy this is getting longer than I expected - yay if you're still reading!)  Now onto the multiplayer modes.  This quite honestly is not a portion of the game that has simply been tacked on as an afterthought.  They clearly thought this part through and put a lot of work into it.  You can complete different kinds of "jobs" as a ghostbuster and you are "competing" with other players in terms of money earned while working.  There are jobs like Thief, where you are trying to steal back artifacts that ghosts stole from you, and there is Survival where there are waves upon waves of ghosts sent after you and your team.  You get money as you capture ghosts or assist capturing them - capturing a ghost in your own trap is clearly the most profitable.

While some of the boss battles can be frustrating as you get knocked down and out a lot, the game is in general quite forgiving and fairly easy.  I've been playing on Experienced difficult which I think is comparable to most games' "Normal" setting.  Apparently the story is quite short, clocking in at about 7hours if you ignore most of the artifacts, so I might give it a shot on "Professional" in the future.

Have you played Ghostbusters?  If you have it on 360, let me know!  We can bust ghosts together :)