Midnight Ghost Hunt - Not a bad addon to Left 4 Dead?

"Works inspired by masterpieces are good, but works inspired by classic masterpieces are even better."

Apparently, this is what the developers from Vaulted Sky Games thought when they took on the creation of Midnight Ghost Hunt, a game with common stylistic roots with Ghostbuster.

Fun fact: the ultimate Ghostbusters game - Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed - was released later than Midnight Ghost Hunt, but the latter was clearly inspired by the famous movies with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis in the lead roles.

Both games are very similar, so who plagiarized from whom and why Left 4 Dead?

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If the "Hunters" gameplay was about asymmetrical battles, Midnight Ghost Hunt combines shooter mechanics, stealth action, a game of hide-and-seek, and then goes into a children's game of kwacha altogether.

Like the aforementioned Left 4 Dead, Midnight Ghost Hunt is a single-mode game with a lot of options, but the rules are simple.

There is a closed map in which players are divided into two teams: hunters and ghosts. Before the session begins, the ghosts are given some time to inhabit furniture, kitchen utensils, and other inanimate objects. In the meantime, the hunters are inactive, as they are supposed to be in hide-and-seek, sent on a mission...

...And when the timer expires, the "leader" goes looking. Except that the leader is not alone, and the ghosts can be anywhere and anything. Having played a couple of hours for the Hunters, you can develop paranoia. Here it comes down the hall, you see a chair, you turn around, and the chair moved a little bit, or seemed?

No, it didn't. Every movement of objects in this game is not random. Here you are looking around a luxurious Victorian manor house...

...and here you are clawing your way through the library as a hill of greens. And that's because your role as a chair was lousy, because you were met by "Stanislavsky" with a spectral gun, and you had to rush from object to object to avoid becoming an amorphous pile of ectoplasm... which will be sucked into a ghost vacuum cleaner later on.

And you played it badly only because in the image of stationary objects ghosts leave a trace of ectoplasm, which perfectly captures this hunter's gadget:

Or even this one...

...All to keep the innocent ghosts from any life! For the first five minutes of the match, the ghosts' senses are naturally hurt. The ghosts have little chance of defeating the hunters, because the ethereal ones have too little health and damage. But once midnight comes...

Run away!

At midnight, the ghosts get the strongest buff, and the victim swaps places with the hunter. But on the condition that at least one of the ghosts remains alive, pardon the pun.

The choreography of roles is the most interesting part of Midnight Ghost Hunt. It's not enough to learn how to shoot or dodge, because there is no role choice here - you have to play both hunter and ghost. As in this moment Midnight Ghost Hunt shows its affinity with Left 4 Dead: in the multiplayer mode "Battle" players were divided into teams of 4 and at the end of each round swapped places. There was no leveling up in the usual sense of the word in Left 4 Dead, it is not in the usual sense of the word and Midnight Ghost Hunt. Yes, to buy weapons and abilities will come for in-game currency, but grind it you will not more than a couple of hours.

All equipment bought in the game has no gradation in rarity, quality or strength. By buying skills or items, you only unlock what should be unlocked from the start.

Hunters start the game with one weapon, one special item and one perk. Sometimes it makes more sense to equip one player with two weapons at once, and the second player with two types of equipment. As well as in Left 4 Dead, everything is decided by hands and knowledge of the map, as well as in Left 4 Dead, it is impossible to get an advantage by means of items in Midnight Ghost Hunt...and as in Left 4 Dead, Midnight Ghost Hunt is full of battle-hardened "fathers" who do not leave any chance for the newcomers to win...

...and the Hunters start every match next to the equipment table, where you can change the items you use and reassemble your build at any time. Remind you of anything?

Balance problems and echoes of cybersports

While Midnight Ghost Hunt may seem like a nice, unobtrusive evening's entertainment at first, it's impossible to play it without a staffed team. The game is too tied up in interaction, right down to the choice of perks. You can't just take an all-purpose weapon, some solo tool, and pull out on your own. Just like in Left 4 Dead, breaking away from a group is tantamount to death.

Every item in Midnight Ghost Hunt has a weakness that won't allow you to score on the team: the spectral cannon is good in combination with the fast reload, which makes you a medium-to-short range ghost annihilation machine, but this combination almost completely deprives you of any control over your enemies - you can neither slow down nor stun. The flamethrower combined with the portable radar will not let the ghosts hide, but with such a set your damage per second will leave much to be desired. The only way to cover your weaknesses is to cover them with your allies' strengths. Like Left 4 Dead, Midnight Ghost Hunt has no way to consistently win alone, unless you have nubs playing against you on a regular basis...

Verdict

Midnight Ghost Hunt is a curious game, but you shouldn't buy it just for yourself. For a comfortable and fun game you need at least 1 friend who agrees to keep you company. Playing with random players is a game of Russian roulette with your nerves: you will regularly lose to better coordinated players, the language barrier is possible, and you can not vouch for the personal skills of every teammate. Midnight Ghost Hunt is not expensive, but as the game is in early access, I do not recommend to buy it for full price.