The first Ghostrunner pulled me in with its cyborg ninja aesthetic and surprised me with its fast, exacting gameplay that felt very rewarding if you had the reflexes for it. Ghostrunner II is very much the same in that it’s a still a mash-up of Hotline Miami and Mirror’s Edge by combining brutal one-hit-kill combat with intense parkour challenges, but the slight tweaks made to the experience due to its nature as a sequel can sometimes leave a little to be desired.
I’ve opened many reviews with a paragraph about video game sequels, but it hasn’t felt quite as meaningful before as it has with Ghostrunner II so here it is again: there are three ways to make a game sequel. The first, and least done due to the risks involved, is to do something radically different from what came before, trusting that your audience will come along for the ride. The second is the exact opposite in both design philosophy and commonality: do the exact same thing again with the same kinds of tutorials and pacing, knowing that what worked once will work again. The third way is a more nuanced version of the second, where you make a game that’s similar to what came before but with less handholding and more mechanics early on, which creates a feeling of continuity between the experiences and gives the gameplay a greater chance to evolve. Batman Arkham City and Knight are some of the best examples of this design philosophy, with Arkham Asylum essentially acting as a tutorial while City and Knight start you off with many of the same gadgets and gameplay mechanics that Asylum drip fed players on release.
This third kind of a sequel is the route that Ghostrunner II took, for better or for worse. Jack, the cyborg ninja from the first game, returns with much of his kit still intact and immediately starts Ghostrunner II with new toys that many probably would have argued were missing from his first adventure, but each comes with a bit of a design detriment. The most notable of these is the addition of a block button, removing Ghostrunner‘s heavy emphasis on constant movement to avoid being hit and instead just giving you the option to right click to both defend yourself and perfect parry your way into instant kills. While this sounds great and typically makes the game’s combat a little less challenging the game has also been designed around this mechanic, typically by throwing you in tight corridors with the machine gun enemies you would have never faced head-on in the first game or simply by making every enemy attack in a more telegraphed manner so you can parry them easier. Neither is a great thing to experience, as the former drastically limits your options in combat while the latter can make combat more of a “wait and see” experience as you need to wait for certain enemies to approach you before you can kill them. The throwing star that was just a limited-time puzzle weapon in the first game is also now a permanent addition to your arsenal to stun enemies or solve puzzles, but this also means that Ghostrunner II is a lot more focused on precision targeting than its predecessor, which can lead to its own frustrations. And of course there’s the much-advertised bike that I will complain about in much more detail later, which adds an entirely new kind of gameplay to your cyborg ninja experience.
There’s a lot more new additions to the gameplay than those three, such as a cloaking ability and the revamped chip upgrade system that is less inventive and gives you the ability to see unlockables for free, but the main point I want to highlight is how flaky all of these new features feel. The first Ghostrunner‘s gameplay loop felt like a general progression as you climbed the game’s tower, with new abilities and increased difficulty as you moved forward (and up), but Ghostrunner II‘s “picking up where we left off” nature seems to have limited any similar feeling of a continuous sequence. Platforming challenges vary wildly from moment to moment, featuring technical moves that the first game saved for the final levels VERY early on and other inconsistencies like the second boss’ platforming challenges being far harder than the final boss’. Perhaps even worse than that are the mechanics that the game introduces and then just forgets about for hours at a time for no clear reason. Throwing projectiles into special walls to make grapple points disappears almost as soon as it’s introduced until the final levels, holographic walls that you can turn on and off are only a part of two early levels, the final area introduces two new mechanics and three new enemy types when the conclusion of a game is supposed to be a culmination of everything you’ve learned until that point, and there’s a weird double jump with tokens mechanic that feels right out of Neon White and literally only happens three times in one level, never to be seen again.
Putting on my tinfoil hat for a moment, my suspicion about why these mechanics appear and disappear so quickly is that the developers wanted to create a roguelike rather than a full game for a sequel but couldn’t include enough content to justify selling it at a reasonable price, so they made a campaign to introduce all their gameplay ideas and then hoped people would stick around to experience them in the roguelike setting. Said roguelike is “Roguerunner,” a minigame of sorts that you unlock early on in the campaign that plays like a mix of Ghostrunner and Slay the Spire, where you follow a map along a series of small challenges with random powerup rewards at the end of each. I didn’t care for it for two reasons: first because it takes place entirely within the game’s cybervoid, which has a muted architecture that I don’t enjoy compared to the game’s “real world” environments, and second because the game operates on a set lives system that I feel is an antithesis to Ghostrunner‘s trial and error gameplay style. Fortunately the rewards for completing Roguerunner are all cosmetic and I have no actual evidence that the game design suffered just because the devs wanted to make this instead, but I can’t think of a better explanation for why so many interesting ideas are introduced and then dropped immediately.
Back in the main game, all of the “here today, gone tomorrow” systems creates a rather unbalanced experience that feels even more constricting due to the sense that Ghostrunner II is very strict about “you need to play this my way.” This could also just all be in my head but I distinctly remember the first Ghostrunner sometimes being TOO generous with player freedom, occasionally creating a momentum deathloop where you’d wall run a little too well and find yourself flying off the platforms from your speed. This almost never happened to me in Ghostrunner II, in fact I frequently would find myself dying in ways I never had before as I hit death walls just below the lips of certain ledges or fell to my death when there were platforms that would kill you if you even considered pressing dash to stick a landing (which is a lot of fun trying to gauge in a first-person game). This isn’t to say that I died more in Ghostrunner II than the first game, in fact given the blocking ability and no boss as mechanically punishing as the first game’s Gatekeeper I’d say Ghostrunner II is an easier game overall. But many of the deaths that I did experience felt less like I was dying to an obstacle and more like I was dying to not approaching an obstacle in a very specific way, which takes away from the original’s feeling of freedom in approaching its various challenges.
Granted, Ghostrunner II does add a lot more “freedom” with the new bike, a bike that I feared I would hate and had that fear confirmed when it showed up halfway through the game. I soon as I saw that damn thing in the first trailer I thought “oh no they’re going to do something open world with this” and wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what happens. It starts innocently enough with a frustrating but still linear sequence where you have to “race” to get outside before your target arbitrarily gets too far away from you, which I hated due to a clunky slashing mechanic you had to use to open some doors but whatever I was willing to believe it could get better. Then once you get outside of the tower that you climbed in the first game you zoom around some empty roads for a while, constantly breaking your flow when you come to a locked door that forces you to get off the bike and hike around a small platforming challenge before you get back on the bike and repeat this another six times. Finally there’s an even wider, more open area where the game says “hey go to these three areas in your own time” which leads to driving around a lot of very samey ruins for thirty minutes while you stumble upon even more small platforming challenges until it’s time to go home. It was about halfway through the middle sequence as I encountered a third locked door and once again jumped off my bike in search of a switch that I got sick of this gameplay loop, and there was so much more of it to go before I was done.
If my bland description of the bike sequences didn’t properly convey why I disliked them, I’ll try to go a little deeper. In my opinion games like Ghostrunner or other platformers do better with a controlled, linear environment that emphasizes the tight gameplay that makes the best of the genre such a joy. Long stretches of just driving to small, two-minute “run up the wall and push a block to open the door” puzzles just hinders the experience rather than enhancing it, and beyond that there’s nothing that interesting to look at in the bike sections as all you’re surrounded by is sand and ruins. Furthermore, the bike exemplifies my complaints earlier about the game wanting you to play “it’s way,” as I repeatedly found myself stuck in the terrain if I wasn’t driving perfectly in the middle of the road. Land slightly to the left or right after a large boost jump (and there’s a lot of them) or take a corner in certain areas too fast and you’ll be trapped in a pile of rubble with no way to free the bike, forcing a restart. The worst part of all is that the game doesn’t feel like it gains anything from going outside, as all you do is chase the bad guys and come straight back to the tower. They could have easily skipped the outdoors sections entirely and just had the bad guys hiding in the bowels of the tower where no one had looked for decades, but no we needed NEW bike and NEW environments.
Said bad guys are the Asura, the driving force behind Ghostrunner II‘s plot. They’re first-gen ghostrunners with a grudge that want to free themselves from the control of “Bushido,” an ingrained part of their programming that prevents them from hurting anyone inside of the tower where all the humans live. Admittedly Ghostrunner II has a lot more of a story going on than the first game, thanks no doubt in part to a larger budget, but the whole thing feels underdeveloped or simply just missing content in parts. They try to touch on a lot of things in the plot, from the fallout of a successful revolution and the new roles said revolutionaries have to play to Jack’s humanity and how much you can trust/forgive the people that worked for your oppressors, but none of it ever seems to go anywhere or even worse hits a resolution before it even established the problem. After two lines about trading for water any drama about trying unite all the different gangs into one government disappears by the time you get your bike, Jack only has one line period about not knowing why he’s helping the revolutionaries before deciding to leave at the end of the game (saying something about “listening to himself” rather than “the men or the machines” but there was never any build-up to that conflict), and half the characters you work with are members of the previous regime but they mostly get accepted into your treehouse club immediately. Worst of all, the Asura’s motivations and objectives are never properly explained, as I just made a supposition about Bushido being the reason they keep saying they need to be “freed” from the humans and all they ever do in-game when asked for their motivations is insult you. There’s a last minute “revelation” that their leader may not be actually driven by a desire to free his people and instead just want revenge for being turned into the first ghostrunner, but then when you actually fight him he’s still (very angrily) insisting that everything he’s doing is to “free us” so even that pivotal moment falls flat.
Obviously you’re not playing Ghostrunner II for the plot but as this is a “bigger sequel” kind of game the story is pushed more in your face than the first one, so much that you have to navigate through narrative sequences before you can get back to the action. There is now a “home base” that you return to after every level to talk to NPCs, buy upgrades, and look at your sword collection, but the dialogue sequences have Bethesda-tier animations (including a little zoom-in when you start talking to them) and the writing feels rather awkward as this cold cyborg ninja with no emotions keeps asking people “how are you holding up?” It all feels like a hindrance and drives the breaks in the narrative logic home even harder when you’re just trying to get to the next level but you have to sit through a story that’s barely held together as it is. Granted much of the dialogue is optional but if you’re putting the effort in to talk to everyone to try get something out of the story you’ll probably be even more put off than those who are just trying to push through it.
Visually the game continues to excellent presentation of its predecessor, though with slightly less interesting environments this time since a good third of the game takes place in a ruined city and another notable percentage is in featureless labyrinths. You’ll spend a lot less time traveling through a neon Bladerunner world, perhaps partially due to my observations in the first game that no one noticed any of it when they were so busy trying not to die, but what you do see of those areas looks great. Enemy design is still a lowpoint, both in terms of just being more bland looking “cyber punks” and also because there’s a whole second set of zombie enemies that just have the same attacks as the human enemies, but for the most part you’ll be going too fast to tell. Ghostrunner II‘s theme of “good ideas but strange execution” continues in the presentation with some very strange/surprising technical issues that aren’t present in the first game, such as horrific slowdown in a few specific areas or a surprisingly short distance where enemies and moving platforms have their frame rate pacing reduced. I also encountered two very intrusive glitches during the same level towards the end of the game: first all the color on the screen was stuck in the washed-out state from when you use the ability to slow down time, and then a number of enemies that I needed to use as platforms never spawned. The first just an irritant as it affected visibility to a degree and was eventually fixed when I quit out of the game and jumped back in at my latest checkpoint, but the missing enemies made the level impossible to complete and required a full restart.
Shortcomings aside, if you loved the first game you’ll find a lot to like in Ghostrunner II. The weak narrative, bike, and occasional technical issues besmirches the “purer” experience from the original but the replayability of the Roguerunner mini game and the general feelings of style and frantic speed are undiminished and leads to generally satisfying experience. The fact that it’s slightly easier thanks to the blocking makes me want to recommend it to new players as well, but it being built on the foundation of the original makes me feel like it won’t land well with people who haven’t gotten their feet wet in the series already. Maybe try the demo if you’re on the fence, but look out for that stupid bike.
