34.9 hours played
Written 17 hours ago
A fast-paced cyberpunk hack and slash which stays faithful to its predecessor but brings a lot of system tweaks alongside some major gameplay additions.
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Ghostrunner 2 still has you playing as android-human hybrid Jack, once again platforming through obstacle courses while disposing of a whole bunch of enemies along the way. However, where the original had tight, linear level design, part two goes for grander levels, featuring large open spaces as well as branching paths for you to traverse. This certainly makes them feel more expansive and even real, but also quickly leads to disorientation, interrupting the gameplay’s flow.
Compared to the original game, Ghostrunner 2 offers a lot more abilities, letting you switch between and use 3 support skills as well as 5 different ultimate attacks on the fly. While I enjoyed the variety and some of the ways these are used, swapping between all of them is quite janky. This is especially bad for the many ultimate abilities, whose similar effects hardly warrant being split up like this. Jack’s basic skillset is also changed, allowing you to block indefinitely and reflect projectiles from the get-go. The perma-blocking in particular stood out as a bad change for me, encouraging a passive playstyle instead of the classic dodge-based sprint from enemy to enemy. It also makes certain encounters much less challenging.
The upgrade system was overhauled as well, now simply limiting the number of active upgrades, with new upgrades and additional slots being bought with currency collected throughout the game. The streamlined upgrade assignment sadly feels a bit bland, which can also be said about many of the upgrade options, which boil down to unremarkable number tweaks.
There are quite a few new enemy types requiring different strategies and enabling more interesting encounter design. Most of these do a good job of delivering unique interactions, though I found some to be straight up annoying to fight, mostly due to required actions’ timing being too strict and missing said actions being punished too harshly.
Of course there’s also some entirely new content, most notably in the new bike levels which see you race along obstacle-lined roads and allow you to leave the familiar enclosed environments of Dharma Tower in favor of exploring the wastelands around it. This is a welcome change of pace, but doesn’t flow well, since basically all of these levels are strung together instead of being interspersed with the regular levels.
Besides these pacing problems, the bike felt rather floaty to me, being much less reactive than the on-foot gameplay. Thanks to its speed and the much more open design of the spaces the problem of levels being too big is also noticeably exacerbated, making them annoying to explore fully, with poor player guiding additionally making it difficult to know where exactly you’re meant to go at times. On a more positive note, while the outside levels feel a bit bland, they wonderfully contrast the areas explored throughout the rest of the game.
Unlike the first game, Ghostrunner 2 features a hub world in which you customize your skills, view collectibles and access story levels as well as different game modes. This is certainly neat, but replaces simple snappy menus with a spacious area you have to slowly walk across over and over again. Returning to the hub after each mission also isn’t a great match for the game’s narrative, which becomes especially apparent during the levels set outside the tower, which don’t feature it at all. While the hub area contains a bunch of characters to chat with, their conversations are rarely interesting and in fact noticeably showcase the visual infidelity of the character models, with dead stares and an overall lack of facial animations.
Story-wise, I found Ghostrunner 2 to be less interesting than the first game, with it feeling rather tacked on, though I did enjoy some of the expanded world-building. The bigger problem than the narrative itself is the way it is presented, with things rarely being taken seriously and dialogue being riddled with attempts at humour. In contrast, the villains you’re going up against are meant to be badass, yet end up being cartoonish in how exaggerated they are. Our protagonist Jack faces a similar problem, with his voice lines trying way too hard to make him seem tough.
Coming back to gameplay, you can find a variety of collectibles within each level, rewarding you with cosmetic tweaks or tidbits of information on the game’s world. You can once again also compete for highscores on each level, with many additionally containing optional challenges with their own leaderboards. These essentially act as quite varied micro-levels for you to master, which I sadly found to be rather inhibitive to the flow of the level’s they’re placed in. This is made worse by the fact that replaying them or merely taking a look at their leaderboards is only possible by playing through the respective level again.
There are also some additional game modes available, the first of which is RogueRunner.exe, which expands on the wave mode present in the original game. RogueRunner has you complete a number of increasingly difficult levels, unlike the first game’s version giving you a limited number of lives to do so. You’re presented with a branching map, letting you choose between parkour or combat levels as well as perk selections, which let you choose one of a couple of upgrades to apply to an entirely default version of Jack.
Most of these upgrades sadly aren’t very exciting, boiling down to number tweaks, with many of them also taken straight from the base game. While this means your progression isn’t too exciting, you can really feel your power increase as the mode goes on, which I found quite neat. Sadly, the way you’re given these feels a bit too random, hardly allowing you to assemble synergies. Conversely, I liked the concept of forcing you out of your upgrade comfort zone, which also pairs well with the fact that the mode gives some more attention to underutilized gameplay features from the base game.
The second side game mode is Endless Moto, being available through Ghostrunner 2’s only non-cosmetic DLC. Said mode puts you onto a procedurally assembled Cybervoid racetrack, providing limited number of lives to get as far as possible. The biggest problem with this mode is once again the janky bike handling as well as poor visibility of upcoming track sections. While it’s not my thing, Endless Moto makes for a fun distraction, but just like RogueRunner gets repetitive rather quickly.
As for visuals, everything looks just as sharp as it did in the original, with levels and their Cybervoid sections featuring more varied environmental design. Some effects are a bit janky and downgraded, with the blood effects being the most noticeable - particularly in the game’s intro of all places. The soundtrack is once again great, though I found many sections of the game to be lacking music, making them feel rather dull. These sometimes use atmospheric pieces tracks, which work well to support the solid sound design but simply felt too boring for me.
There are also some polish issues, most notably with the collision of many objects not matching their appearance. This was especially noticeable in the outside levels, which contain many props that can be entered as well as blatant invisible walls. Beyond that, I found the wall run in particular to have janky collision detection, often resulting in it not triggering where it should have. As I used the German localization, I also encountered a lot of obvious mistranslations, often resulting from sentences being translated in isolation, without the context of surrounding sentences.
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To make a long story short, Ghostrunner 2 is a decent sequel that doesn’t reach the heights of the original in most areas, but still ends up being a fun to experience.
