REVIEW: GhostControl, Inc (Steam)


Title	GhostControl Inc.
Developer	Bumblebee.
Publisher	Application Systems Heidelberg
Release Date	December 13, 2013
Genre	Turn-based Tactics / Business Simulation
Platform	PC
Official Website

“Another review of GhostControl Inc?” you say? Well, it’s hit Steam with a whole boatload of improvements, so I thought it’d be interesting to see if a great game could get better. In case you missed my earlier review, here’s the short version: GhostControl Inc is an old-school X-Com game with a Ghostbusters theme, and it’s great. You should have bought it back in February. If you didn’t, you now have no excuse.

The first thing you’ll notice right off the bat is that you not only name your first employee, but you can name your business, too (in case “GhostControl, Inc” isn’t hip enough or something). Now, you can rename any employee, or even your business, at any time. It’s a simple fix, but one that adds just a little more personalization to the game.

The second thing you’ll notice — your headquarters now has a spare room or two. You can either build a laboratory or a training room. In the original version, you really only effectively use three team members, since you could only level up characters you used (of which your limit was three at any given time). The ghosts weren’t going to wait for you to level up a new character before you needed them. Now, you can send any excess team members to training, which will allow them to level up at the expense of time and money. Now, you have more team building options. If you want some more members to vary and maximize your tactics, you can train them while you work with other forces. Also, in the original version, you’d buy more powerful weapons as you needed them. Now, you can upgrade some of them for a small fee. It only adds a small upgrade, but it is cheaper than a brand new weapon, so you can save some money.

The last major addition is a couple of new ways to use ectoplasm (the stuff left over when you capture ghosts). Before, the only thing you could do was sell it. It was a good source of income, and a way to redeem a failed mission. Now, you can do a couple more things. After you upgrade your car to a certain point, you can use ectoplasm for two types of fuel: normal and nitrous. The former’s pretty self-explanatory; it’ll save you a trip to the gas station. As for the latter, in the original, if you waited too long to get to a job, a competitor would steal it. It’s was a great way to encourage players to quickly get to every job they took on, but, sometimes, you would just be too far away. Now, you can hit the nitrous, and get to every job on time. It’s not really game-changing, since I only remember losing a job a few times in each playthrough (and one was unavoidable just to show you it could happen), but still: nitrous makes any car better.

The rest of the additions are mostly in the background, which you won’t notice one way or another. The only change I’m a little iffy on is the new environment cycle. Before, you could hold the Shift button, and all walls and object in the level would vanish, so you could more easily check your positioning. Now, it cycles through turning off walls, turning off everything, then back to normal. That’s not a bad thing, since seeing the objects is useful for seeing your positioning, but, since the view is just until your press the button again, I got confused without the walls there, as I would try to go through the walls. Again, the new view is really good, I’m just not sold on the implementation.

This is still GhostControl, Inc, though. If you didn’t buy it before, buy it now. It’s awesome, and you should all play it. These new additions only make the already nearly perfect game better.