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Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed is a game with some strong points but also a fair number of issues.
The game is essentially a Ghostbusters-flavoured version of Evolve. Four players play as Ghostbusters, aiming to capture the Ghost. The Ghost's job is instead to scare off the civilians and generally cause havoc while not being caught. The Ghost can fight back against the Ghostbusters, but they can only be slimed temporarily while the Ghost can only be caught so many times before they are defeated, so the Ghost generally has to be sneaky and focus on trickery over combat. The core idea is generally pretty fun. The game controls well as both a Ghostbuster and a Ghost and the Ghosts have a wide variety of fun abilities to use. The Ghostbusters are simpler to play, but the nuance comes from the fact that they need to coordinate with each other to do well.
The game's presentation is very strong. The game has a good sense of style, the characters and effects look good, and there's lots of customization options for your Ghostbuster. The game also sounds great, it has the original voice actors for Ray and Winston, and the new characters fit right in with the original cast. Of course, the classic Ghostbusters theme song is also present. Top marks here.
I also want to praise the game's online interface. Matchmaking is fairly fast, and once you get into a lobby, you can stay with the same group between games, which gets you into matches with little downtime. Matches have great pacing, which is probably one of the game's strongest points, matches simply feel like they last about the right length, which gives the game a strong "one more game" element to it that many other games fail to match. Even when the game annoyed me (which was not uncommon) the quick pace of the matches kept it from becoming too frustrating. Which player plays the Ghost changes between matches, so you won't have to wait long to be the Ghost if you want to be.
It's also worth taking a moment to talk about the game's content delivery structure, though the story here is that there's basically nothing to talk about. Unlike almost every other game of this type, there are no battle passes or microtransactions, the $20 base game gets you everything. You do have to unlock most things by levelling up or completing challenges (ie, trap 10 ghosts), but none of it time-gated and you level up fast simply by playing online matches. You can also unlock everything by playing private matches as well, but we'll come to those in a moment. Suffice it to say this is very refreshing and helps remove much of the stress that can be associated with games like this.
It's not all good though. Game balance has long been an issue for 4v1 games, and this game is no exception. When you first start playing, your perception will likely be that the Ghost is extremely weak. Some of this is because the Ghost is much harder to play and the tutorial for playing the Ghost doesn't properly cover a few very important concepts, but even once you understand those playing the Ghost still feels like a constant struggle. The Ghosts have limited capacity to fight back against the Ghostbusters, so they must generally focus on hiding and escaping, but because the Ghostbusters can ping you and they have a detector that can find you it's hard to stay hidden for long. Once they find you, it's very easy to get grabbed and tossed into a trap, and it's also a common scenario to immediately respawn in view of the Ghostbusters and have it immediately happen again. This issue is exascerbated by the fact that some of the maps are very small and full of dead zones that offer almost no places for the ghost to hide. Even if you manage to haunt the building to 100%, you don't win, you have to hold out for a 90 second countdown and if you get caught once during this time you lose, even if you had rifts left (any remaining rifts cut 15 seconds off the holdout time). This means you can potentially dominate the entire game, then have someone spot you as soon as the countdown starts and lose instantly, which is incredibly frustrating. On the flip side, if your rifts get quickly found and destroyed by the Ghostbusters, it's almost impossible for the Ghost to come back and win.
However, the weakness of the Ghost is counterbalanced by one of the most absurd exploits I've ever seen in any game. When playing as the Ghost, when you get grabbed by the Ghostbusters or they try to force you into a trap, there's a simple minigame you can play involving mashing buttons and moving the cursor to try to escape. The better you play the minigame, the faster you break out of the tether, and if you do it perfectly you can even escape a trap, though that's almost impossible to pull off. However, periodically you'll come across people who can break out every time without fail, making them functionally unbeatable. I assumed, as anyone would, that they were simply cheating with an autofire macro or some such. It's sort of inherently obvious that allowing the ghost to escape a trap by passing what is essentially a QTE is a poor design, since it's the only way the Ghostbusters can win and there's really nothing they can do to force the Ghost to be caught other than hope they mess up. The thing is, these players are actually not cheating at all, there's simply a setting in the accessibility options to Auto-Mash for these minigames. You would think this would just automatically mash at moderate rate while locking out the ability to manually mash, but no - it does indeed automatically mash the prompts, but you can still manually mash as well! Effectively, turning on this setting allows you to mash at double speed, like a built-in turbo controller. This allows the ghost to escape tethers near-instantly and makes them almost impossible to trap, and hugely skews the game balance in the Ghost's favour. In a certain sense, this probably does improve the game balance a little, but having been on the receiving end of it it's certainly not fun to play against and it should almost certainly be patched out ASAP. The Ghosts do need some kind of buff, but abusing an accessibility setting isn't the way to go about it.
There's also private matches. A cool feature that the game has is that you can opt to play matches with just your friends and have bots fill out the rest of the players, and this counts towards progression exactly the same as online matches. In theory, this might allow you to dodge some of the balance issues mentioned above, but unfortunately the bots are simply trash. The Ghostbuster bots effectively don't do anything at all, they are almost totally incapable of trapping even AI-controlled ghosts and frequently get stuck in one area for the whole game, and the AI ghosts aren't much better, often suicidally charging you from across a room or doing other foolish things to give away their position while not doing much of anything to haunt the building. Even a beginner will easily thrash the highest-level AI every time, so don't think this will act as a replacement for playing against real people. There are "Ghost Bounties", which allow you to play against AI-controlled Ghosts who get a ton of cheats, and on the hardest difficulty these are somewhat challenging, but it's not really a good kind of challenge, the AI still isn't very smart, but they get a ton of free Drudges and can instantly escape your traps pretty much every time, so it basically just comes down to luck. The ability to escape traps really is at the root of most of the game's problems.
Still, despite these issues, there's decent fun to be had in PVP matches, and the brisk match pacing helps make a lot of these issues a lot easier to forgive. No doubt the game could be a lot better with a couple well-targetted patches, but even in its current state it's probably worth the $20 even if some matches will just make you shake your head.