The best way to understand each ghost’s unique tricks and strategies in Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed is to play them a lot. Just like the Ghostbusters have specialized equipment modifications, each playable ghost has its own strengths and weaknesses. The general rule for playing the ghost is to be very fast and very sneaky. Being good at hiding in plain sight and quickly sabotaging Ghostbusters is important to be able to fully haunt a building. In this asymmetrical, multiplayer game there are four Ghostbusters and one ghost. A player has to pull every trick in their book when playing the ghost.
Players can fully customize their characters in Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, some resembling Super Mario’s Luigi, and the modified tools make a ghost’s job harder. One of the most important and central things that a player has to be good at is escaping a particle tether. There are many Ghostbuster upgrades that make the tether stronger, the trap stronger, and the trap vortex bigger. If they get tethered, fighting free is the only way for a ghost to avoid the ghost trap. Getting free just requires the player to pay close attention to the pull direction to quickly maneuver out of the beam, preferably before any others have a chance to get a tether up too.
Fighting Ghostbusters
With original Ghostbusters, like Ray and Winston, in Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed teaching recruits how to bust ghosts, ghosts have a hard fight ahead. Thankfully, ghosts do have a few tricks up their slimy sleeves. One way to get the jump on a Ghostbuster is to sabotage their Proton Pack. If they leave the group, it’s easy enough to sneak up behind them to wreck their pack and make them take time to fix it. Another way to fight back is slime. Ghostbusters can be completely immobilized with enough slime, and it builds up with each slime exposure if they don’t clean it off. Sabotage may be great to attack a lone Buster, but slime is the way to get at multiple. When targeting multiple Busters, another great weapon is to unleash minions, which will occupy their time for a bit allowing the player time to escape.
Haunting Items and Maps
Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed is a well-crafted game, there are a lot of mechanics at play to create a dynamic experience. A ghost’s top priorities are; the building’s haunt level, scaring civilians, and hiding rifts. The first thing to do on any map is hide rifts in good spots, they’ll need to be difficult for Busters to find so that the ghost player can’t be permanently caught. Picking innocuous and hard-to-reach items in busy rooms is the best method to make rifts difficult to find. Busters can track ghost energy with their PKE Meter, which functions like the EMF Detector in Phasmophobia and helps identify haunted ghost rooms. Keeping in mind the tools that Busters use is important to hiding rifts.
The longer it takes to close the rifts, the more time the player has to haunt the building. To get a building’s haunt level to increase, scaring civilians and haunting objects is the objective. Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed makes these objectives fairly easy. Scaring civilians into running out of the building just requires going up to them and activating the scare move. The more civilians that run out, the better. Haunting objects is as simple as passing by them and activating them, enough ghost energy in the room will label the room haunted.
When deciding whether to play a Ghouly or an Ectoplast, like Slimer, in Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed it’s important to look at the ghosts' strengths (and weaknesses) listed in the selection menu. Real variety doesn’t happen until more ghosts have been unlocked, but when going into a map a player should note what the ghost is best at. An Ectoplast, like Slimer, will be better at utilizing slime, while another type will be better at scaring civilians. Tips, tricks, and strategies are very useful for playing the ghosts, but ultimately a player’s natural preference determines which ghost’s strengths fit them best in Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed.