It is with extreme, cheese-filled regret that we admit this, but…busting actually does make us feel good. We really didn’t want to put it that way, but the heroic fun practically oozes out of Ghostbusters: The Video Game in both singleplayer and multiplayer modes.

We recently got a chance to march through the first few hours of the campaign, which included many of the areas already seen in our earlier previews — the return to the Sedgewick Hotel to recapture Slimer, the office building fight against Stay-Puft, and the journey through the New York Public Library to get the librarian ghost that got away. But this time, we also got to explore the Ghostbusters firehouse, escort the Ecto-1 to Times Square, and search for secret collectibles with our PKE meter.

Crucially, we finally got to hear all the actors playing their roles in full. Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman is the lazy ladies’ man — perhaps sounding a little older, but his ass is also a little wiser. (Case in point, in a pickup line to new love interest Dr. Ilisya Selwyn: “You know, I never forget a face…attached…to all the rest of that.”) Ray Stantz still sounds as enthusiastic as ever; it’s as if Dan Aykroyd never stopped playing the role. You’ll get to hear plenty of Egon Spengler and Winston Zeddemore, too, since you pair up with everybody for parts of missions — clearing debris from shattered New York streets with Winston, for instance, or blasting spectral books in the bowels of the library with Ray. The ghost-wrangling and trapping mechanic still felt fun several hours into the game: playing with new proton-pack functionality like the ghost-freezing Stasis Stream and sticky Slime Tether offered some welcome variety.

It’s not exactly survival horror, but many parts of the game are at least unsettling, such as walking around a flooded hotel scanning for spectral entities, hoping a spider-like candelabra doesn’t pounce on your face. Or in the darkened library, where symmetrical book stacks (just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947!) appear where you were standing just moments before. Stalking through the juvenile section of the library, listening to the cries and whispers of phantom children and seeing spectral handprints on the walls…brrrrr. It’s easy to remember Ghostbusters as a comedy, but it tried to be spooky, too. The game arguably does this even better, aided ably by great graphics and glowing visual effects. You’ll catch cartoonish ghosts, but the ’busters themselves look only slightly caricatured, and the environments are rich with destructible details.

We like joining the iconic team as the freshly recruited Experimental Equipment Technician, but we’re also happy that multiplayer lets us jump into the suits of the original four Ghostbusters. Did you like Gears of War 2's Horde mode? Good, because that’s basically what you’re going to get here — six four-player co-op scenarios (and mini-campaigns that tie three scenarios together) on Xbox Live. Some are simply contests to see how long you can last, but they’re all competitive: your performance will be ranked at the end of each round, and you’ll earn both cash and bragging rights. Containment matches — where a wave ends when all ghosts have been eliminated (or time runs out) — bear the strongest resemblance to Horde; they’re also the most fun. Other variations include Destruction (quickly blast the ghost-spawning artifacts that appear around the level) and Protection (defend your PKE Disruptors from the ghosts who try to destroy them). Quick, fun stuff.

Playing through the main campaign in co-op wouldn’t make much narrative sense, nor would launching proton streams at your teammates, so co-op multiplayer really is the only option. While we’re concerned that the few number of MP levels could work against the game’s long-term appeal, what we played was a blast. There’s enough positive stuff in place to make us think Ghostbusters, like Riddick and Lego Star Wars before it, could join the increasingly promising pantheon of Xbox 360 movie-inspired games that don’t suck. And that makes us feel good, too.