Despite a controversial start over a year ago, Ghostbusters: Remastered has received almost unanimous praise from gamers following its release on online gaming platform Steam in November.



We need to start with the elephant in the room, and that is that this remastered game and its developers were not very popular with gamers when the project was first announced. The reason for this is that it was to be a timed exclusive, for a full 12 months, on the Epic Games Store, a direct rival to Steam, the platform that the majority of gamers prefer.

While exclusives are nothing new to the gaming industry, the manner in which Epic has been perceived to pay developers not to list their games on Steam for some time has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and has resulted in some pretty nasty backlash for some titles.

The most common form of retribution is to review bomb the game as soon as it is launched. This is the act of inundating a store page with negative reviews regardless of the quality of the game. A lot of gamers make their purchase decision based on user reviews so this can have a devastating impact on sales.

Ghostbusters is also an almost universally loved franchise that has had a huge impact on popular culture from the original two films. It spawns a plethora of other media from comic and manga books to video games, a branded pinball machine, and even an online slot game featured at brands that are on the list of top NJ casinos, such as 888casino and Virgin Casino.

So the potential for an angry reaction from passionate fans was huge. However, despite spending a long year as an exclusive on Epic, Ghostbusters: Remastered has gained a “Very Positive” approval rating on Steam since its launch in November. This means up to 94% of reviews about the game on the platform are positive and says a heck of a lot about its quality as a game.

It has been praised for the nostalgic feeling it creates in fans of the original two Ghostbusters films. It’s even been suggested this should be considered the third story that everyone wanted, obviously throwing a little shade on the third film of the franchise. It was also a release many gamers have been looking forward to after the original was delisted from Steam in 2017.

It does need to be mentioned that the original version of the game was also a massive hit. Ghostbusters: The Video game, released in 2009, has a 95% approval rating among Google users and sold more than three million copies worldwide. So they had a pretty solid base to build upon with the remaster, although it has been proven on plenty of occasions that this is not an automatic recipe for success.

The gameplay is identical and the graphics have been updated to give it a modern look and feel so you don’t feel like you are playing what is effectively an 11-year-old game. And it works beautifully. If information wasn’t so freely available it would be easy to convince someone it was a brand new game.

The only major change is one no-one is likely to complain about and comes in the form of a very sweet tribute to Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the original Ghostbusters movies and tragically passed away in 2014 after a long battle with illness.

One nuisance is the bizarre decision to keep the negative mouse acceleration functionality from the base game, despite it being one of the most disliked features. It’s not the biggest of problems, but if you have access to a controller, it is preferable to play this game using that over a mouse and keyboard.