Grabbed By The Ghoulies – Review

We all waited a long time to see what the brilliant RARE could offer up on the powerful xbox, was Grabbed By The Ghoulies disappointing or did it have the usual ‘Rare Flair’? Let’s find out….

Originality out the window with the background story to Grabbed By The Ghoulies being your stereotypical boy and girl wander into a haunted mansion, girl get’s kidnapped, boy rescues girl scenario; but it is here that lack of originality ends.

Fairy Tale styled pages reveal the story as it heads along, our hero Cooper must rescue his girlfriend by working through pre-determined rooms in the mansion. Each room sets up a certain procedure Cooper must follow to exit the room and carry on (for example kill so many ghoulies by only using furniture to thwack them with). The controls are simple, both thumb sticks, the left to move, the right to attack, and that’s pretty much your lot (other than the addition of camera controls). It’s this simplistic nature that is both the games greatest addition and also it’s downfall. Whilst the game is superb pick up and play fun it can get repetitive all too fast and even slightly frustrating in the later levels as the difficulty heightens.

That said this is Rare and therefore has the usual humorous characterizations you’d expect and this coupled with sweet graphical touches and interactive environments make this game a real treat. Visual presentation is superb and the accompanying soundtrack, although made up of noises rather than actual dialogue is perfect at enhancing your gameplay experience.

I can’t help but compare this a little to Luigi’s Mansion on Nintendo’s GameCube, anyone who found themselves playing that for hours on end will find the same happiness factor here, only with an older audience in mind. It’s one of those games that, akin to a Pixar animated feature can be played by youngsters quite happily, but some of the humor will go right over their sweet, innocent little minds, unlike mine of course. With nice touches throughout and a comedic core this game is a definite player, even if you don’t want to buy it you should definitely rent it just so you can chuckle along to all those little ‘rare’ touches that will have you grabbed by the ghoulies.

ADDENDUM:
Man that was a short review, but here’s an addition. This original review was written way back in late 2003 and it’s now 2009, last week I dusted off Grabbed By The Ghoulies and inserted it into my Xbox 360 (yes I still have it as it was a firm favorite), just to see if it had lost any of its magic. It had ever so slightly, but it was still a hoot to play. Simple gameplay controls and a cute story, despite its old hat ‘Boy Rescues Girl’ premise made for a couple of hours of smiles. Early this year Grabbed By The Ghoulies was released on the Xbox Originals service, so you can download it and give it a go, but if you like tactile gaming, grab it second hand in your local game store since it’s backward compatible with the 360. Still a good game.

Review by Angela

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment