THE STORY

Halloween has been and gone but the hangover from Hell is still thick in the air with ghouls and ghosts on the loose everywhere. Is there something strange in your neighbourhood? Is there something weird, and it don’t look good? Who ya gonna call?

THE EXPERIENCE

Combining the concepts of Ghostbusters and augmented reality was always going to be a winner, wasn’t it? Those of us that remember the excitement of sitting in the cinema to see the, retrospectively rubbish, spook-tacular special effects of the opening scenes of the original movie still have a special place in our hearts for Venkman, Spengler, Stantz and Zeddemore, so the chance to charge up the proton accelerator backpacks on our own Androids is too much to resist.

An AR experience, Ghostbusters: Paranormal Blast is not a million miles away in concept, design and gameplay from Alien Attack reviewed back in August, in that the app uses a combination of your camera and GPS to tailor the Slimer shooting action to your own area with ‘incidents’ haunting your home turf and, of course, the ectoplasm-oozing enemies appearing in the room around you.

The actual ‘busting’ side of the equation involves following the targeting system to guide your gun to the ghoul and hit it hard with a hot particle stream. Naturally, it won’t give up the ghost that easily, so you’ll find yourself spinning around the room giving chase to get the spook in your sights again, hit it more times than it hits you to break its spirit, trick it into the trap and get it back into containment – yes, you will look like a lunatic if you play this in public.

THE BOTTOM LINE

With detailed 3D ghostly graphics covering familiar faces and all-new creations, 20+ missions, authentic sound effects and incidental music, plus upgrades galore to earn or buy outright, the gameplay may become rather repetitive, but for fans of the films it’ll be sheer fun with a proton gun.

Additional information

Current version: 1.1.1.7
Requires Android 2.3.3 and up

Download the Ghostbusters: Paranormal Blast app from Google Play

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