Adam Hall

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios | ETA: Out Now | Price: £39.99 Inc VAT.

I’ve always considered being grabbed by the ghoulies a very personal thing so you can imagine my dismay when a video game arrived on my doorstep that uses that very obscenity as its title and main focal point! Disgusting! Of course it then turned out to be about GHOULS as in Zombies! Not your GHOULIES as in… Yeah!

Rare’s latest zombie romp, Grabbed By The Ghoulies, sees you running around a haunted house being tormented by, what appears to be, a disturbed ghost/zombie pilot in an attempt to rescue your female companion who’s been kidnapped by the baddies!

GBTG is, from the onset, predominantly a child’s game. It doesn’t sport complex story lines or have a control system that takes weeks to grasp, it’s just a simple, cool-looking little adventure, and despite its target audience, you just might get more enjoyment out of this than you’d expect!

Gameplay
Although many critics may frown upon GTBG for being overly simplistic and juvenile, I personally think it’s a breath of fresh air. Not because I’m a simple man, despite popular belief, but because the amount of pretentious video games that get released these days is reaching a phenomenally offensive level and although games like GBTG by all means don’t re-invent the video game, they at least rekindle the long-lost simplicity that games once proudly paraded.

GBTG is told in a very Max Payne esque storyboard like manner that although isn’t as excellently executed as our gun-toting friend’s adventure, combined with the “voice acting”, it makes for a very transfixing form of entertainment.

As soon as you drop into the main gameplay you’ll find yourself kicking and punching little ghoulies with a combat system that, initially, feels quite satisfying, but descends into a monotonous repetition of events that has as much diversity as a broken record quicker than you can say “Ow me ghoulies!” On top of that, I couldn’t help but find the whole experience somewhat stressful; at some points there are many enemies at one time, some of them a lot smaller than you. If you don’t run to them, they’ll eventually crowd around you and trying to boot all of them before one attacks is just very traumatic! Now you know why I could never complete System Shock 2!

Despite the stress, though, GBTG makes up for it not only in loading times that are just astounding, but also in the fact that in between rearranging the faces of Zombies and increasing the surface area of spiders, you can smash up pretty much everything you see. On TOP of that, you can pick up a lot of objects to use them against enemies. I found it somewhat ironic beating the crap out of a skeleton with a book titled ‘Spooky Tales’.