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