Just sorting through your inventory requires opening up a new window for each hunter, while actually figuring out what any given item does requires hovering over it until a separate popup appears. More frustrating and arbitrary still is the UI. A tough gig might not give you enough quid to pay your gas and hospital bills, but one that’s a (literal) walk in the park can pay out almost a grand. On top of that, rewards for combat seem entirely arbitrary. There are also random elements to the business side of gameplay, so a job might spawn on the other side of the map, giving you no chance to reach it before one of your rivals. This makes it difficult to plan effectively, and if the odds aren’t in your favor, ghosts can sit on traps turn after turn with 0 health, whittling away at your sanity. There’s no way of telling how your stats affect your weapons, if at all. Unfortunately, the only percentage that’s actually transparent is the base efficacy of a trap or gun. Like XCOM, your success or failure is determined by percentage chances based on your equipment and stats. You need to trap them or they’ll keep fighting forever. Most beams either push ghosts or pull them toward you, but of course it’s not enough just to shoot them. The result is pretty much the same – when a character runs out they’re gone for good – but there’s a percentage chance with each attack that your character will freak out and run away. Instead of assaulting your stamina, the ghosts try to break down your sanity. With the lights out, you won’t see ghosts until they’re right in front of you. As such, doors and light switches play a key role in governing combat visibility. Rather than your standard outdoor arenas, most of GhostControl’s missions take place inside apartments and homes. It’s mostly standard turn-based strategy fare, although the developers have added a few interesting thematic twists. Different enemies have special abilities that can affect the flow of battle, such as teleporting, or stunning your hunters. Each of your hunters gets two “action points” per turn which can be used to move around, take shots, lay traps, or change out equipment. Your hunters and the ghosts take turns moving around the grid-based environments and attacking each other. Ghost hunting is a lucrative trade – enough to support several competing manufacturers of guns and ghost traps – so you’ll need those upgrades to compete with business rivals on top of the specters, ghouls, and poltergeists.Ĭombat is likewise easy to grasp, as it’s essentially just a pared down version of XCOM. Doing jobs earns you money, which you can use to buy better gear, hire more teammates, and eventually upgrade your office and car. You manage a team of “controllers” out of a small garage in central London, taking ghost-catching jobs around the city (really just the area immediately surrounding Westminster Abbey and the London Eye). German indie studio Bumblebee Games have brought some great ideas to the fore in making their off-brand paranormal pest-control simulator, but it’s held back by some baffling design choices and painfully obvious budget constraints. Of course, that doesn’t sell to publishers quite as easily as “ Gears of War clone with ghosts,” so it was left to fans to make it. It’s the Ghostbusters game that always needed to happen – one part ghost catching action, one part business simulation. There is a part of me that wants, desperately, to love GhostControl Inc.
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