Now Playing: Ghostrunner

After sinking countless hours into Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3, it was somewhat refreshing to jump into a short, punchy little game like Ghostrunner. I played it over two days and clocked about 8 hours – although I’d estimate 4 hours of that was me repeatedly dying. I can’t say Ghostrunner quite clicked with me at first. I was expecting Titanfall with a samurai sword in which I’d be bouncing off the walls of a cyberpunk city cutting hapless minions in half.

And whilst that is, essentially, what you’re doing in Ghostrunner, it’s not quite the action focused game I was expecting. It’s a platform puzzle action game in that specific order. The bulk of Ghostrunner is made up of first person platform segments as you wall run, jump, grapple and ride rails in order to progress from A to B.

There’s a large dose of trial and error at play in some of these sections – in fact, in the game in general – in the sense that you can’t always react first time to the challenge before you. Only by replaying it and memorising the positioning of walls, grapple points or rails is how you progress. There’s a generous checkpoint system in place so if you do fall and die, you won’t ever have to replay too much but, if you’ve followed this blog, you’ll know I’m not the biggest fan of games that require trial and error to proceed.

Fortunately, Ghostrunner isn’t too guilty of this – at least in terms of platforming where you can rely, on the most part, on your reflexes and skill. Combat though is a little more trial and error based. There are times when you really just have to replay a combat encounter multiple times in order to learn the placement of enemies in order to plan the best route to take them out because you won’t know where they all are the first time and it’s easy to get hit from an enemy you weren’t even aware of.

After platformer, Ghostrunner is very much a puzzle game and the action sequences and boss fights are all little puzzles in their own way. That’s something that took some time for me to get my head around and I did find Ghostrunner pretty frustrating at first because I was trying to play it more like a pure action game – like Titanfall with samurai swords.

But it’s really not. You can kill enemies in one hit but you also die in one hit, and in an area with multiple enemies, the key is to plan and memorise the perfect route to wipe them all out and unlock the next area. Once I did get the hang of it – and the game introduced a few fun little abilities to help mix things up – I really did start to enjoy it. The game does do a decent job of pacing out new enemy types and new skills to keep things feeling fresh. The environments don’t change much, but there are new platform elements introduced as you go.

 

The best boss fight is easily the first – it’s the perfect example of a challenge that initially feels impossible and yet, once you pull it off, it’s incredibly satisfying. It’s fantastic and I loved it. Unfortunately, the next two boss fights after this aren’t quite so good. The second is fun, but pretty easy once you get your parry timing down and the last feels a little like a ‘we didn’t know what to do with this’ kind of fight. In fact, a lot of the end of the game feels a little like that, especially the last level, but we’ll come back to that later.

At certain points in the game you’ll enter the ‘cyber-void’ or something like that. It really kind of sucks and although this is where you’ll unlock your new skills, for some reason they put in these tedious sections where you have to collect glowing balls and solve basic puzzles. It just feels like dull, pointless padding.

The story and characters are pretty terrible. You play as Jack The Robot Who Growls and there’s a guy called the Architect who gives you directions over the radio who is clearly evil and will betray you at the end of the game. That’s not a spoiler because it’s so f**king obvious. The ‘lore’ of the game world isn’t well presented through the environment which is designed to facilitate the gameplay – in other words, it don’t make no sense as an actual, living world unless everyone gets around by wall running and jumping from floating platforms. Maybe they do.

There are collectibles to find but they’re really not worth your time. And whilst I appreciate the game doesn’t bother with intrusive cut-scenes, it’s kind of hard to listen to the dull exposition over the radio when you’re repeatedly dying and reloading on a tricky platform section. So yeah, you won’t know or care about the story or characters at all. At least, I didn’t. But I didn’t need to. Ghostrunner is a game that’s at its best when it focuses purely on its gameplay.

The game runs nice and smooth but it’s not without a bug or two – such as all the times I jumped through scenery and got stuck. Annoying more than game breaking because checkpoints are so frequent, but worth mentioning.

I wish I could say the game goes out on a high but the last level is by far the worst thing in the game. It really does feel like the developers ran out of ideas before the end so they just throw you back into the cyber-void and make you run a gauntlet of tricky platform sections in which they throw waves of deadly red balls at you. To make matters worse, there’s a few ‘jump pad’ parts that sometimes toss you away from the next platform you need to hit, instead sending you hurtling into the void.

It’s f**king terrible. Whereas the first boss fight felt like the perfect balance of challenge and frustration and then elation when you beat it, this final stretch is a perfect example of how NOT to do difficulty – it’s simply designed to be as tedious and frustrating as possible for the player for the sake of it. Dodging walls of red balls isn’t a ‘test’ of the player’s skills – it’s just some random shit thrown in at the end of the game that’s unrelated to everything else.

I really wanted to come away from Ghostrunner wanting to play more or to pick up the sequel, but I’m not really convinced. The fact the developers couldn’t even keep this game, short as it is, from feeling repetitive and padded isn’t a great sign, nor is how the game pretty much just gives up at the end like they really did run out of ideas.

I do think there’s a really fantastic game within Ghostrunner – that first boss fight is tremendous – but it feels like that fantastic game is really struggling to escape from a lot of unnecessary padding, dull puzzles and a pointless story. It’s a shame, and maybe the sequel does address these issues. It’s something I’ll have to look into. But if it’s just more of the same, then I probably won’t bother.

Overall, despite me going on a bit of a rant about Ghostrunner, I still think it’s a pretty solid and fun game. It’s certainly not for everyone – not everyone will have the patience even for its best sections, let alone its worst. It’s not amazing, but it’s decent enough and I’m glad I played it for those few great moments.

6/10

Gallery: Starfield (Part 2)

Now Playing: Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 is an excellent sequel that delivers exactly what I wanted – an engaging, thoughtful continuation and expansion of the Alan Wake story. The gameplay though . . . well, we’ll get into that later. Alan Wake 2 is the kind of game I could talk in-depth about the story and not really spoil anything because to someone who’s not played it, what I say probably won’t make a lick of sense.

And whilst Alan Wake 2 might – on occasion – feel like it’s being a little too weird for the sake of being weird, it does have a genuinely engaging and – by the end – gripping narrative that really draws you in and makes you want to keep playing. It’s the gaming equivalent of ‘just one more page’ which is pretty damn appropriate.

I’m not going to get too in-depth on the story though because I really think it is best experienced yourself. It’s what I’d call a slow-burn. It takes a little time to get going but once it does, you’ll be hooked right until the end.

In Alan Wake 2 you’ll be playing as two characters – Alan Wake and Saga Anderson – and the narrative will shift between the two as you progress. Between the two, I’d have to say I enjoyed the Wake sections the most. Whilst Saga ties nicely into the narrative, she’s not as interesting to actually play.

Because that’s the big weakness of Alan Wake 2 – for all its great visuals and lighting (although somewhat dated character models), great music, neat use of live action sequences, welcome tie-ins to Control and the previously mentioned engaging narrative – Alan Wake is a somewhat mixed experience in terms of gameplay.

The first really noticeable thing is how slow the combat feels compared to the original. I don’t see this as a bad change, however. A slower paced, more deliberate style of combat probably fits the style and atmosphere better than the more action orientated original. The problem is, there are moments when the game wants to ramp up the action and have Saga and Wake fighting hordes of Taken just like the original . . . and it just doesn’t quite work.

The environments can be small so there’s less room to manoeuvre, reloading or healing takes longer, and accessing your inventory doesn’t pause the action. It’s more like a survival horror in the sense that resources are limited and you to need to make every shot or item use count. Like I said, this slower, more deliberate style of combat does fit the game better and it does work very well when the action is appropriately tailored for it.

But, unfortunately, the game doesn’t always do that, and in those more hectic, heavy action scenes the combat can become more frustrating than fun because it’s not designed for that kind of fast-paced action. This is very telling during a big battle towards the end that’s clearly designed to evoke memories of the concert fight in Alan Wake 1. But in Alan Wake 2, the section just isn’t half as much fun to play because you’re so slow to move, shoot and reload, not to mention having to keep playing ring-around-the-rocks every time you want to heal.

The game also keeps dumping more and more supply boxes onto you like f**king loot boxes dropping out of the sky. It’s like they realised the entire combat system which is built on slow, deliberate play and resource management just doesn’t work in a section where you get waves and waves of Taken attacking you, so to ‘fix’ the issue they just drop more and more ammo onto your head.

No. Just no. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. So sadly, overall, I’d have to say the combat of Alan Wake 2 isn’t actually as good as in the original. It should be better because it does take a more appropriate approach in terms of style, but the game doesn’t play to the strength of that style often enough. And sometimes, it disregards it entirely forcing you to play through action sequences that really aren’t designed for it.

The game is by far at its best in terms of combat when you’re fighting smaller numbers of but more powerful enemies – or even a single, very powerful foe that requires smart use of the environment and your resources. That’s when the game plays to the strength of its own system and it creates some genuinely tense and engaging encounters.

I also think that combat animations – especially for the Taken – really aren’t that great. The combat in Alan Wake 1 was so clean and precise. Everything feels a little more messy in Alan Wake 2 – especially the ‘darkness shield’ that you have to break before you can damage the enemy its protecting. The visuals for it aren’t as clear as in the original leading to situations where you’re really not sure if you’re broken the shield or not.

But I don’t want to rant too much about the combat because it’s really not bad – it’s more how certain sections don’t really fit the style and it creates a kind of jarring clash that you just have to grind your way through. Also, the combat isn’t that significant a part of the experience and ultimately, doesn’t drag the game down by much.

In terms of the mechanics of Wake and Anderson, Wake is far more interesting thanks to his ‘Writers Board’ that lets him directly change a scene (local environment) within the game world. It’s a perfect and clever combination of narrative and gameplay. It’s also technically impressive as you flit back and forth between multiple scenes and plot points throughout a level to progress.

But Anderson? Her mechanics – the Case Board and Profiling – are perfectly fine from a narrative perspective but aren’t very engaging from a gameplay one. The Case Board is exactly how it sounds – a board where you piece together evidence. Or don’t because you can’t do it ‘wrong’ as such – Anderson just mutters at you until you put each piece in the right place. And profiling? Like I said – neat narratively speaking, but it’s really just you sitting back and listening to characters talk.

Wake’s mechanics work so much better because they directly impact how you progress. It just feels like they really weren’t sure what to do with Anderson in terms of actual gameplay mechanics so they have her collecting pointless ‘charms’ and solving stupid math puzzles to open supply boxes. No. Just no. The first few sections in which you play as Saga are so slow and dull in terms of gameplay. They’re good as far as narratives goes, and that’s what pushes you through.

All the Wake stuff is great though. And thankfully, the Saga stuff gets much better before the end. I do wish the game had found a clever way to combine narrative and gameplay together at the very end though – instead, it kind of fizzles out where the gameplay is concerned and you just run along a linear path and then watch a live action video ending.

It’s disappointing – not from a narrative point of view because I really liked the ending – but disappointing that the game couldn’t find a way to embrace the medium. To actually engage the player in the action. Instead, it resorts to just making us sit back and watch a video. I’m sorry, but I don’t play video games to just sit back and watch the dramatic moments.

It’s like the end of The Last of Us which I played recently – imagine if when Joel enters the operating theatre it’s all just a cutscene – it just wouldn’t have the same impact. Alan Wake 2 does such a great job blending narrative and gameplay – at least through the Wake sections – but then misses the most important part.

At this point you might be wondering why I said Alan Wake 2 is a fantastic sequel given how much I’ve dunked on the game throughout this review. But honestly, it really is a fantastic sequel. In fact, that’s the reason I’m dunking on it so hard – because it’s a great game that could have been even better. I’m so frustrated by it, despite really enjoying it.

Despite all the flaws I think the game is a worthy – if not superior – sequel to the original. It’s a game I thoroughly enjoyed and I’m really looking forward to the upcoming DLC. I’m also hoping we’ll get a Control 2 or Alan Wake 3 (or both!) to tie all of this together.

8/10

Suburban Killbot: Steam Replay 2023

In 2023 I played 35 games on Steam unlocking 747 achievements. 31% of these games were new releases, 66% were released in the last 1-7 years and 3% were released 8 or more years ago. This is very similar to last year – 34 games, 542 achievements, 26% new, 68% recent, and 6% old.

Only 2% of my total playtime was spent in VR games in 2023 compared to 9% last year, probably because I stopped playing Phasmophobia in VR. Last year it accounted for 68% of my VR time, this year was zero.

15% of my time was spent playing games with a controller. The top 3 were Forspoken (35%) Spider-Man Remastered (18%) and Hi-Fi Rush (17%). This was a drop from an overall of 26% last year.

My longest daily streak in 2023 was a ridiculous 107 days from Wed, August 30th to Fri, Dec 15th in which I played 16 different games. In 2022 it was only 45 days and 8 different games.

My overall top 3 most played games by % of playtime were Starfield (31%) Mass Effect Legendary Edition (11%) and Cyberpunk 2077 (9%).

September was the busiest month with 20% of my total playtime, and March was the slowest with only 4%.