24.5 hours played
Written 15 days ago
A hack and slash in which you fight and parkour your way through a cyber punk megastructure.
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The titular Ghostrunner is Jack, an android-human hybrid equipped with superhuman sword fighting and parkour skills who you take control of after he awakens. The game presents you with a series of linear levels acting as obstacle courses for you to traverse. These sometimes feature small puzzles to mix things up, but their main challenge is found in the numerous enemies strewn around them who attack Jack on sight, with one hit being enough to reset him to the last checkpoint. With this setup, trial and error is the game’s central motive, with you having to find a working path through them by familiarizing yourself with their layout and figuring out the optimal way of disposing of the enemies.
Your only weapon is a sword, necessitating swift movement and dodging to get close to your enemies before finishing them off oni one swift strike. Beyond simple running, Ghostrunner lets you slide, wall-run and shoot a grappling hook to travel along ziplines, catapult yourself towards spots or move platforms. Most importantly though, you can dash, allowing you to change your movement direction in instant while slowing time to a crawl, thus allowing you to dodge projectiles. There are also special abilities you get access to for a limited time, e.g. shuriken throwing, which are used in both combat and puzzles. All of this enables satisfying gameplay centered around smooth-flowing action which makes you feel like a badass.
As you progress through the game, you also unlock various upgrades to upgrade your abilities, sometimes merely tweaking some numbers and sometimes expanding your skill set, e.g. giving you the ability to reflect projectiles. These upgrades use a rather unique assignment system, which represents them as differently shaped blocks you need to fit into a size-limited and uneven grid in order to activate their effects, forcing you to prioritize.
As for the aforementioned enemies, these are also quite varied, forcing you to change up your strategy quite a bit. These mostly use ranged weapons, such as single and rapid-fire guns or wider energy blasts, but also come in melee-focused variants which engage you head on, forcing you to reposition. These different attack types do a good job at keeping you on your toes and bringing further variety to the levels. To enable the aforementioned gameplay, these enemies are quite predictable, with their interplay and the level design being the main factors making them harder to dispose of. This creates a good difficulty curve, with the game becoming noticeably more challenging without becoming overbearing.
Mixing things up further are so-called Cybervoid sections, which are narrative-focused level segments focused on rather simple puzzles, with the earlier ones acting as tutorials for your abilities. While these aren’t very challenging, they cannot be skipped on repeated level playthroughs, which can be quite annoying, since they break up the regular gameplay flow. There are also boss fights, essentially being drawn-out fighting sequences which have you learn patterns and execute small platforming challenges. They’re essentially a compressed version of Ghostrunner’s gameplay, making you learn patterns and react to the boss’s actions, which works well but can feel a bit quick-timey at times.
Asude from its gameplay, Ghostrunner also tells a basic story, mostly serving to provide reasons for you to traverse its levels. At its core, this narrative is just what you’d expend from a dystopian cyberpunk setting. There are some twists and turns along the way and the narrative is interesting enough, but certainly nothing groundbreaking. You’re told said story through voice lines, with characters remotely conversing with you as you traverse the levels, which is unobtrusive and works nicely for the gameplay.
Beyond the core gameplay, Ghostrunner provides some additional challenges, mainly in the form of collectibles strewn around its levels, which unlock cosmetic items or tidbits of lore, giving you some more insight into the game’s world. You may also compete for highscores on each of the levels, going for lowest completion time or number of deaths. Aside from these minor distractions, there’s also wave mode, which has you complete a series you in semi-randomly generated areas, letting you pick one of 3 randomly selected upgrades after each encounter. These include abilities and upgrades from the regular game but also many completely new perks, allowing for some nice build variation. In contrast, the encounters offer little variation and the mode in general is hardly challenging thanks to it giving you infinite retries for each wave, though experimenting with different upgrade combinations is certainly entertaining.
Ghostrunner features a single gameplay DLC, that being Project_Hel, which holds a number of additional levels and expands a bit on the story of main game. The DLC places you into the shoes of a new playable character and delivers more of the established gameplay with some unique twists, most notably that you no longer die in a single hit. This results in quite different encounter design, which I enjoyed a lot. The teaks to your movement and abilities do a good job at shaking up formula in general, making Project_Hel a great addition to the main game.
Presentation-wise, Ghostrunner goes for a mostly realistic art style, with clean high-quality visuals creating interesting environments and making for some stunning shots, in spite of the usual Unreal Engine wonkiness present on some effects. In spite of the atmosphere-focused approach to its graphics, the game doesn’t compromise on visibility, with the path forward as well as the enemies and important objects being distinct and easy to spot.
Ghostrunner’s hack and slash nature is highlighted by satisfying gore effects, with hit enemies being sliced in half and spurting blood. The same is true for the game’s other visual effects as well as for its sound design, featuring meaty sounds that perfectly convey the actions they accompany. Last but not least, Ghostrunner also features a banger electronic soundtrack that gets blood pumping and does a great Job of keeping you engaged even after retrying a section for the 20th time.
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Ghostrunner offers a good mix of challenge and plain fun packaged by a marvelous presentation. I had a great time with the game and can only recommend it.
