Why Ghostbusters is so damn frustrating

Ok, so I was kind of excited about this one. From everything I'd heard it sounded like a winner. The whole cast was back to lend their voices and it was written by the original writers of the movies. But the gameplay is repetitive, the saves and checkpoints clunky, and other than the occasional decent joke...not much fun.

Instead of the traditional "30 bullets in a clip" and then you need to reload system, you can only use your proton pack for a set amount of time before having to "vent" it with a different button press. Kind of neat and different but it also highlights another failing. The overheat status and your character's health are displayed on the pack which you can see because of an over the shoulder 3rd-person perspective. This worked very well for Dead Space, but here the displays here are tiny and nonsensical. I can never see what they read in the heat of battle, when I need them most.

Every location has it's own set of ghosts to kill and trap but they end up just being the same type of enemy with a different "skin." I quickly got bored with this. And then when you finish fighting with them, you find yourself waiting (too long) for the other characters to finish their dialogue so you can get on to the next part. I never know if I have to get to the next invisible checkpoint or just wait for them to stop rambling. So I guess my complaint is that there's too much of the excellent voice work.

I said the save system is bad because I can't ever tell where I'll be when I shut off the game and come back. I've always thought it was dumb that the 360 can't see that I only have one storage location (hard-drive) so yes, that's where I want to save stuff. Why do I have to pick it myself? But this game is even worse because of the annoying (and dire) warning every time you start the game that save data will be overwritten when I pick my hard drive as the storage device. It's confusing but it seems to be the only option if I want to continue my career.

This leads me to another rant about 360 games in general. Why do I have to babysit them by pressing A about 10 times just to do what I want to do 90% of the time and continue my solo career. Press A to start. Continue Career. Load Data. Yes, from the hard drive. Yes, I'm sure. Yes, I know it will automatically save and overwrite it. The only game of recent memory that bypasses all this stupidity is the Grand Theft Auto series. You pop in the game, go make a sandwich and when you come back your character is all loaded up and ready to go. How hard is that?

But back to Ghostbusters. I'm not sure how much more I'll stick with it when I have Prototype and Shadow Complex calling me.