Spirits Unleashed opens with a music video of Fortnite's Ernie Hudson doing a walk-and-nose at the original fire station. I may run this place, but don't go around calling me "boss," he tells me. I move my mouse from one end of the desk to the other, trying to break eye contact with this awkward scene. He orders me to learn how to use my proton pack, while his minions, a new generation of ghostbusters, teach me about "side jobs." We need a union here.

Workplace grievances aside, ghostbusting is not the worst job there is. On my first day on the job at Spirits Unleashed, I was allowed to play with a cool toy. The Proton Pack was a portable three-mile island attached to a fire hose that roared when I pulled the trigger for the first time. That was the first and only time the frame rate dropped. It was as if the game had been surprised by the sheer power of the Ghostbuster cannon. It felt good.

The proton packs worked in tandem with the traps in the film, and the harmless streams intersected in multiplayer.

Ghostbusters '84 has a sharp wit: it remains a hilarious satire on money-grubbing small-business psychos and the gnarly bunch of red tape they face. The asymmetrical multiplayer of "closing three portals while being harassed" in Spirits Unleashed doesn't seem to be in harmony with the cynical energy of the original. Sure, a motley crew of gig workers and I had to coordinate and focus fire to get the best angle, balancing the heat of each proton to draw the ghosts into placeable traps, but no one felt like Spengler or Ray did.

Spirits Unleashed has no personality. The custom characters are really empty and only give positive howls in the tutorials. I would have liked to hear an Akroyd/Ramis-like riff mid-mission, like in Warhammer 40,000: Dark Tide, but there is none of that.

Visually, too, "Spirits Unleashed" resembles the rounded-edge style of "Fortnite" without any sense of style. There is some impressive lighting with proton packs, and lightning bolts fly up and down adjacent walls like a nuclear kaleidoscope, but little else. The music is oddly adjacent to the Harry Potter film music, a mediocre 4/4 arrangement of womp womp horns and royalty-free strings. Ghostbusters Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed sells the fantasy of being a ghostbuster, but without the style or humor necessary to make you feel like you're wearing an ugly gray jumpsuit.

Spirits Unleashed is dull every moment. When you blow up a ghost, the meter fills up. Once that meter is full, the ghost can be drawn into the trap as long as the trap has a charge (another meter). The proton pack overheats if you shoot it too long. Now you have three meters on the screen. After the tutorial, there are three more, none of which will fill or empty particularly quickly. The important one is the "Bill Hunt" meter, and when it is maxed out, the paranormal forces win. The meter only moves up and down and requires only passive management.

The only interaction not dependent on the meter occurs when the ghosts approach the public. To calm them down, an active reload of Gears of War is required. (Hey, we're ghostbusters, not social workers.)

These civilians take up residence in six bleak locations, most of which are businesses haunted by the fear of unpaid wages and OSHA violations. Real bustheads might get a kick out of roaming the world of the iconic firehouse hub, but even as a casual fan, I found little to keep me occupied between Ghostbusters jobs.

As Dan Aykroyd's likeness and voice legitimately tell us, ghosts are not all the same. There are five different types of slimmers that players can control, each with different abilities to harass or hinder the human player. The ghosts are too quick to catch up when bustin' and too fragile to bother taking risks when spookin'. At first glance, Poltergeist seems to be a meta-pick, slightly faster than the already too-fast default ghouls, and capable of producing nasty defensive mobs.

"Spirits Unleashed" is not that satisfying to play. The "combat" has nothing to do with precision or accuracy, and is entirely focused on the cohesiveness of team play. Well, I think it's adequate. However, the upper limits of individual play are quite low. There is very little equipment, and the proton pack upgrades seem indistinguishable from the normal model. Unless you have ironclad communication with your teammates (which is never the case in quick play), you're unlikely to pull off a win.

It all comes down to preventing ghosts from walking through the door once they are free. As a result, playing solo online is often too boring to be worth it, and the AI is too simple to be challenging at the moment. In most matches, my human team accomplished every objective except destroying ghosts. I don't know how much of that is due to imbalance or quick-play apathy, but that doesn't change the fact that Spirits Unleashed can be frustrating at times.

I had heard that Bustin was a tough blue-collar job, but the minute-by-minute urgency of "Dead by Daylight" is absent here, and you never feel that the odds are completely in your hands.