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abroxus-blog · 7 years ago

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Grabbed by the Ghoulies Review (2003 XBOX)

During the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 era, few developers had as many critical and commercial hits as Rareware. Now, in 2017, the company is largely considered to be a shadow of what it once was. To many gamers, the issues with the company began when Microsoft bought them up from Nintendo in the early 2000s to make first-party games for their new gaming platform, the X-Box. The purchase was a big and expensive move by Microsoft, intended to show gamers that they not only meant business, but would secure the talent to truly compete with Sony and Nintendo. Unfortunately, at the time of it’s purchase, Rare had three games in development, and the company only managed to finish one during the X-Box’s entire four-year life-cycle, with the other two games being delayed so often that they were eventually released as 360 launch title. So how does the much-maligned Grabbed by the Ghoulies stand up? Well… unfortunately… it’s bad.

In Grabbed by the Ghoulies, you play as Cooper, a young man whose girlfriend, Amber, is kidnapped by the titular Ghoulies. As Cooper, you must fight your way through room after room of a cartoonish haunted house to eventually defeat the evil Baron who rules over it, and the various ghostly factions within. The story is slim, and the presentation doesn’t help what little is there. Instead of full cutscenes, the tale is told in rather poorly animated comic book sequences that play out after certain levels. Instead of using full voice acting, the decision was made to use odd noises like in Banjo Kazooie, an idea that worked for the world of those games, but which feels off-putting this time around. Luckily, the cartoony visuals and music have aged exceedingly well, which means that there is some charm to the entire experience, despite the overall weak narrative presentation.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is a mixed bag. The game is a dual stick brawler. The left stick moves your character, while pressing your right stick will cause Cooper to begin auto-attacking in that direction. A quick flick will do a different kind of attack than holding it, which provides some combat options. Most environments have weapons you can pick up which can also be thrown or used to bludgeon enemies with the right stick. The controls work relatively well, and I always found them responsive enough to handle incoming enemies from a variety of different directions. There is also something briefly fun about just destroying the various rooms you come across in search of items.

The game is exceedingly linear. While you have a (frankly quite awful) map of the house, you are always forced to continue forward in a specific direction. In every room, you will begin at the entrance, and must find and open the door on the other side. To unlock it, you might have to smash the room in search of a key, or kill all the enemies or… well… it’s probably going to be one of those two things. To keep it fresh, the designers periodically introduce new enemy types, many of which require different strategies. Some enemies require you to stay at range, or wait for an opening, or use specific weapon types. All these options make combat, for a time, feel rather fun. Other levels will have jump scares pop up as you play, some of which you just must avoid to keep from losing control of your character for a moment or two, others which require a quick-time button press sequence to survive.

The game also begins to periodically introduce “challenges” in every given room. You might for instance, need to kill every bat to leave, but you can only do so using weapons, or can’t accidentally damage any of the furniture. If you fail at the challenge, the Grim Reaper will appear at the exit door and begin to slowly walk towards you with his finger raised, and when he reaches you, It Follows style, you’ll die. You can’t avoid the Grim Reaper forever either, since he slowly but surely will increase in speed until he can overtake you. But, if the Grim Reaper accidentally touches any other enemies, including your largest adversaries, they’ll die instantly. So, sometimes it’s worth triggering the Reaper to take out your greatest foes.

If this sounds like a decent downloadable game, you’d be mostly right. If Grabbed by the Ghoulies had been released as a 15 dollar X-Box Live title, it probably would have been met with a relatively positive reception. Unfortunately, the game was originally released for sixty dollars, and was, as I stated, the first Rare title under the Microsoft regime. Looking at it from that context, Grabbed by the Ghoulies is a disaster. Despite some of the positives, and there are positives, the gameplay gets stale quickly, and the story remains tepid throughout. Since the game’s story has your character travelling back and forth through the house, there is also an incredible amount of backtracking for such a straightforward title. There are rooms you will repeat four times, and nearly all of them you will see at least twice, with only some enemy or objective variants between encounters.

That’s not even to mention that about two-thirds of the way through the game, Grabbed by the Ghoulies starts to get frustratingly hard. Some enemies will be able to demolish you in seconds, and I found myself dying more than five times in several of the rooms. The best strategies for most encounters require you to utilize the various items and power-ups hidden throughout each area, and the only way to find many of those is by smashing objects all over the place. As a result, sometimes it’s beneficial to have an initial suicide run to see what’s available and plan accordingly. If the gameplay was better, or I was still being introduced to new environments, or the story was pulling me through, I could likely deal with that frustration as simply part of the experience, but since the game’s focus is well… the gameplay… the challenge simply begins to drain the fun out of what had prior been a lighthearted experience.

As the final credits rolled, I thought to myself how much the last two hours of that game, where I felt like I was slowly pushing my way through a grinding mill of enemies, felt like a real drag. So, I was honestly surprised when the final time tally popped up and said that I had played for a little under four and a half hours. The experience had felt significantly longer. I have no problem with short games, but If you’re going to have a tight two to five-hour experience, especially for that price tag, it needs to not drag.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Grabbed by the Ghoulies must have had a rushed development cycle… but it doesn’t even have that excuse. The development team, which was headed by the same people who made the classic Banjo-Tooie, worked on it for three years. I know that a year before the game’s release the team switched from developing it on Gamecube to X-Box, and that might account for some of the rough edges, but I have a lot of trouble believing, even if they had to throw a lot out, that this is the best work they could manage in that time. Grabbed by the Ghoulies feels like the team had a decent gameplay concept and a cool visual style which they then scotch taped together before realizing they only had two hours of content, at which point they spent the final four months remixing levels with the same enemies until they had something a little over twice as long. For a company that hadn’t had a significant creative failure in over ten years, Grabbed by the Ghoulies is a real stinker, and a very disappointing first step into the world outside of Nintendo’s shadow.

3/10

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