November 2nd, 2020
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I am TERRIBLE at platformers. I have no sense of timing and I actively dislike the instant kills that come from the bottomless/spiked pits that inherently come with the genre. And yet, for some reason, I keep playing them. Rather than try to psychoanalyze why let’s just go straight into my review of Ghostrunner, because at least in this instance I can blame it on my cyborg ninja addiction.
Hotline Miami was a bloody and sometimes frantic top-down murderfest where you died in one hit but everyone else did too. Mirror’s Edge was a first person parkour game about overthrowing a corrupt government and looking cool while doing it. Put them together and you get Ghostrunner, a frantic, first person parkour murderfest about overthrowing a corrupt government and looking cool while doing it. You die in one hit but so does everything else and you can respawn instantly, so the gameplay becomes trial and error as you try to find the best patterns through the enemies in your path. When you aren’t bisecting cheap cyberpunk soldiers you’ll be navigating some traditional platforming segments that generally involve wall running and air dashing, with just enough vindictiveness to them that you might find yourself dying in these areas even more than you will in the combat arenas.
Said combat is straightforward enough, but as I said earlier the big complication is that you die in one hit. This means that you have to always be on guard, as any stray bullet can mean a quick trip to the restart screen, but you fortunately have a number of tools at your disposal to keep you alive. Your biggest asset is your mobility with the aforementioned wall runs and dashes, which can help you close gaps and dodge attacks in a way that’s guaranteed to make you feel like a bad ass…once you get the hang of it. Speaking of getting the hang of things, your most valuable ability is “Sensory Boost,” a mode that you can only activate in the air that lets you slowdown time to dodge bullets. It takes a while to fully understand how valuable this ability is, especially because exiting it gives you a forward dash that can act as a gap closer and a platforming tool. Combing these skills creates one of the most common strategies you’ll employ as you wall run or otherwise approach a target, activate Sensory Boost to dodge their final attack and then dash to them for a quick slice.
This might sound repetitive, and on paper it is, but the game moves so quickly and you’ll be so busy trying to survive that you probably won’t notice, especially when you run into more enemy types. There’s your basic enemies that only fire one bullet at a time, machine gunners that fire rapidly but have to reload, enemies with shields, etc. The most difficult part of combat comes from enemies that test your reflexes as much as your ability to plan an attack route, namely the sword wielding enemies that you can only beat with special abilities or parrying their attacks with your own. It would be no exaggeration to say that these sword fights are what leads to the majority of players quitting Ghostrunner, since “trial and error” becomes a lot less fun if you don’t have the reflexes to master the timing for rapid sword fights.
If you find yourself enjoying the flow of the combat then the undeniable worst part of the game is when you go to cyberspace. These moments act as the game’s “downtime” where you aren’t constantly dodging bullets but instead you’re tasked with just platforming and solving minor puzzles. When it comes to things that break up pacing it’s hard to compare this to anything… it’s like playing basketball and then taking five minutes to knit a scarf. And at first I was into it, not because I enjoyed the break but because these levels acted like tutorials to unlock new special abilities without having to contrive a reason why real people would stand still so you can air slice them. Eventually even this started to wear thin though, especially as Ghostrunner began to take full advantage of this digital landscape to create hellish platforming segments that would never exist in the “real world” and then laughed at me as I died over and over again, sometimes through no fault of my own.
Okay maybe it was partially my fault, but Ghostrunner‘s physics have a real problem sometimes of giving you a little too much control over your momentum or simply deciding it will make up whatever acceleration it wants. Too often I would find myself running along walls so efficiently that I would end up overrunning the wall and hitting an outer piece of terrain, standing on top of the billboard I was supposed to be running on, or shooting over the platform I was jumping towards and falling to my death. Other times it would feel like either I wasn’t going fast enough or the game was just designed to be vindictive, since I was encountering jumps that were just barely out of reach and required an extra air dash to complete even though visually it looked like I was supposed to make the jump on my own. And yes, there is no doubt that 95% of these instances are user error and I should be applauding the game for giving its players so much freedom over their own speed and positioning… but on the other hand I died way too much to these “boy I bet you wish you had just air dashed face first into this wall just to be safe” moments for me to not complain about it.
Visually the game is great, though the opening levels may not give you that impression as you spend much of it underground. It checks all the right cyberpunk boxes once you get into the city proper with neon lights, street vendors, and piles of trash dotting the environment if you stand still long enough to see it. While some of these side areas contain secrets there’s even more that do not, which makes it even more impressive that the developers took the time to flesh the map out in a game that’s about always being on the run. You can also see this world building effort in some of the dialogue as well, as the “voice in your head” characters justify the semi-magical special abilities and power-ups that you collect throughout the game. No in-game explanation for the music that’s always pounding through your head that I’ve found, but it’s such a nice mix of what you’d expect from a game about being a cyborg killing machine that you won’t get bored of it as you die over and over and over again. So that has to count for something.
When it comes to a game like Ghostrunner it’s impossible to talk about it without acknowledging that you’re going to die. A lot. And it has to be also said that this is not a game that will take you a long time to beat either, as I managed to get through the whole experience in about six hours. Realistically the game duration isn’t an issue, as games like Ghostrunner encourage repeat playthroughs to improve how you play, but at thirty dollars Ghostrunner was a very enjoyable experience for me. With that in mind, the game is absolutely not for everyone, since you need to have the patience to put up with dying and the reflexes to handle some of the absurd platforming segments. Despite all the dying, timing struggles, and occasional physics hiccups, all the frustration would melt away as I leapt off a platform, “force pushed” three enemies into paste, and channeled my inner Jedi to kill seven other targets with reflected bullets. These are the moments that stick with youthrough all the deaths, and if doing things like that sounds appealing to you then you might considering giving Ghostrunner a shot.
Just…look out for the laser pillar.
