Ghostrunner - cyberpunk runner galore

[Darth Roxor]

This looks p. cool actually, like a first-person cyberpunk Prince of Persia.

 

[compvet24]

I find the slo-mo kind of finnicky, like out of place. Can't put my finger on it. Would've been nice if they did a more 3D version of Katana Zero, which aside from platforming does a lot better in both themes and gameplay at this stage!

 

[Harthwain]

I find the slo-mo kind of finnicky, like out of place. Can't put my finger on it.

I think the effect is too strong. It's almost like a pause. It doesn't feel fluid. It pulls you out of the action.

I like the concept, but running-only feels limiting. It'd be nice to have the ability to climb as well.

 

[Jrpgfan]

Played the demo a little bit and this has a lot of potential indeed.

 

[Child of Malkav]

 

[Jrpgfan]

This released today.

I really enjoyed the demo so I bought it. Will post some impressions after I get to play it.

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/ghostrunner?as=1649904300

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...display-of-acrobatic-first-person-platforming

Ghostrunner review - an exhilarating display of acrobatic first-person platforming
Cyberdunk.

Ghostrunner never loses sight of being about speed and agility, making it a constant joy to play.


Ghostrunner is a game about the joy of movement, and I love how it never loses sight of that. You're a cyborg ninja and your weapons are speed and agility; everything you do, and everything the game throws at you, revolves around it. There are many enemies and boss encounters and special abilities, but they all centre on the fundamental idea of momentum.

It's a relief. I worried Ghostrunner would do a Mirror's Edge and get bogged down in combat, but it doesn't. Polish developer One More Level understood why the Ghostrunner demo worked earlier this year, and stuck with it. Do one thing and do it well.

Ghostrunner is a game about acrobatic routines, about devising them and performing them. It's what everything boils down to. You're an incredibly agile character who can wall-run, slide around, swing around, dash around and even slow time. But you're also an incredibly fragile character who will die in one blow from anything. The challenge of Ghostrunner, therefore, is a kind of elegance: not getting hit while simultaneously getting close enough to hit and slice apart others.

Repetition is key. Ghostrunner is a game of trial and error. Think of it like Trials or Hotline Miami. There's an instant restart mechanic you will use a lot. Die and press R (on PC), and you'll be back to the beginning of your current checkpoint, usually only a few seconds away. It's fundamental to the loop of the game. You can't hope to overcome a new area without dying a few times while you hone your plan. Try one way, die, then try another: that's how it goes. You'll come to accept it and, therefore, the sting of dying goes away.

Ghostrunner can be a gorgeous game, particularly when you get outside.

Spoiler

But not entirely. Ghostrunner is a hard game. It's a game of dexterity and one you could probably look very impressive playing if a friend were to watch. But it takes practice. Playing it reminded me of learning a musical instrument, checkpointed areas like passages of music, the micro-moments of them like bars.

One bar might be sliding down a ramp and then leaping up into the air, slowing time, strafing around a stalled projectile, then landing and slicing one enemy in half. Another might be going from there into a wall-run over to another platform and kill. Bar three might be swinging on the energy leash over to somewhere else and slowing-time to perform another kill. And so on.

But each of these bars needs learning individually before they can be put together in sequence. And there are all kinds of things that can go wrong. Sometimes you don't stick to a wall to run along it the way you did before; sometimes you don't latch onto a handrail to slide along it in the way you did before; sometimes an enemy shoots at a different time; sometimes you simply miss your mark because you're getting weary. And it all adds up.

I'm not joking when I say one boss encounter took me 246 tries - deaths - to clear, which sounds ridiculous. I wouldn't play a game if someone told me it was like that. But please don't let it put you off, because, yes, it was frustrating and I stamped my feet a bit, but it wasn't that bad, and it's sort of how it goes. A few levels took me around 30 attempts, a few levels around 80, and a few around 140, but it builds up so incrementally you rarely really notice.

And I hate to say it, but the difficulty brings with it a sense of achievement. There's a moment in Ghostrunner, when slicing your last enemy in an area, that the game slows briefly as if to acknowledge your success, and it feels great. It feels great because you know how difficult it can be.

Special abilities help alleviate the challenge a bit. They're like occasionally usable cheats. There are four, and you unlock them slowly over the course of the game. Essentially, they all find a different way to kill a bunch of enemies at the same time. Blink, for instance, allows you to slow time and mark nearby enemies that you can then simultaneously dash through and kill. Tempest, on the other hand, produces a huge gust of wind that sends enemies flying like ragdolls, and it can return projectile fire too. I don't want to spoil the others.

Upgrading.

A recharge timer means you can't use them all the time, and because they all share the same recharge timer, using one resets them all. Therefore, it's more a case of picking an ability than juggling them all. Upgrades play into this. There's lots of possibility but again, you can't have it all at once. You can, for instance, have Blink affect enemies in a much larger area, or make Tempest recharge instantaneously after catching multiple enemies in a blast. You can even make sword swipes return bullet fire.

But upgrades are limited by space. It's a bit like Tetris. Upgrades manifest as Tetromino-like shapes you equip by slotting them into a grid. But the grid space is small, though it grows over the course of the game. A choice has to be made. Thankfully, you can change your mind freely and swap upgrades any time, meaning you can tailor builds for encounters you're facing.

The only upgrade I would recommend having most of the time is one which marks collectibles on the mini-map, because there are some very cool sword skins to find.

'Cool' is a good word to describe Ghostrunner, actually. It overcomes the occasional kinks and frustrations because, moment-to-moment, it feels so good to play. It actually reminds me of the Wesley Snipes film Blade, bizarrely, and how funky music always pipes up as he dominates another fight scene. It's a bit like that here, funky music starting up in your ear as you approach an enemy-laden problem, pumping just enough to raise your heartbeat. Then your enemies shout something like "Oh shit - it's him!", and then there's a blur of acrobatics, and then everyone's dead and you land, wipe your sword and move on. Picture a Wesley Snipes grin and you've got what I mean.

What really helps the feeling is the game's performance. I'm not going to pretend to be Digital Foundry because that would be embarrassing for everyone, but suffice to say Ghostrunner ran surprisingly smoothly on my mid-range PC. Look at the screenshots, and all the lovely dirty metal and glowing neon and graffiti. I never thought that would run well on my PC, but somehow it does. (Incidentally, I apologise for the choppy performance in the video. It's not representative of the experience I had but was all I was capable of recording.)

It's optimisation like this that speaks to how impressive Ghostrunner is as a production overall. I wondered how it would sustain itself over several hours but it does - over a dozen, if you're asking. It trickles in new enemies, sprinkles in a few boss encounters (bear with them - they're mostly agility puzzles), and gives you a few new toys to play with along the way (some of the temporary power-ups are wonderful). And all the while it tells you a story of revenge and revolution in your ears, which I haven't mentioned before because it's only ever a backdrop to the game. But it's nice enough to listen to and it never slows you down, and it helps ground the game in a time and place. You get a sense of a wider cyberpunk world out there, beyond the massive tower you're climbing.

All that's left for me now is to go back and replay the individual levels, collecting the things I missed, and beating my time to completion and amount of deaths along the way. And I'll do it, not because I'm fussy about that kind of thing, but because, simply, Ghostrunner is a joy to play.

 

[Whisper]

Music just wow

 

[Child of Malkav]

Holy reflexes Batman, what the fuck. This game is tough. But the mobility and responsiveness are on point.
Already died 61 times just in the first level.

 

[Whisper]

Holy reflexes Batman, what the fuck. This game is tough. But the mobility and responsiveness are on point.
Already died 61 times just in the first level.

Get better.

 

[Child of Malkav]

There is a module you can get apparently from the beginning that redirects a projectile back to the shooter if you parry it correctly. So yeah, that makes life a lot easier. Still, tight parry windows.

 

[Draconis]

The game is pretty good so far. Feels like a 3D Hotline Miami with parkour and great aesthetics.

 

[Shackleton]

When did it become ok for trailers to show absolutely nothing of gameplay?

 

[Child of Malkav]

When players got dumber.

 

[Shackleton]

This game should come with a warning-

'may wear out your R key'

Spoiler

 

[Dexter]

I really liked the Demo when I tried it a few months ago, very fast paced Melee-shooter with lots of wall-jumping and some Trial-and-Error platforming. Recommend turning off Blur though. Cyberpunk is going to have a lot of trouble making their Melee combat anywhere even close to this exciting.

 

[Darth Roxor]

someone's been playing system shock 2

 

[Maxie]

so it's a boring version of mirrors edge

 

[Star Citizen]

Nah it took a few runs of the demo to get into this. It's glorious. But price is a bit high for my region so I'll wait for a sale.

 

[d1r]

These aesthetics are on-fucking point.

 

[Star Citizen]

These aesthetics are on-fucking point.

It's glorious. The air dodging mechanic is fuckin out of this world good.

 

[Child of Malkav]

2nd boss battle is awesome.

 

[Morgoth]

This looks like Doom Eternal, but nimbler and without a boom stick.

God can't they just make normal shooter anymore?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Finished it. Yeah, tough as balls. For how responsive it is, it has issues. Mantling makes it so the char climbs on the thing and then advances by a step, causing you to fall, or sometimes jumping again.
By far the most inconsistent parkour move is the jump from wall to wall. A lot of the times the jump is not enough to reach the other wall or you jump past it. It happens quite often, at least to me. The tutorial on this either sucked or I definitely missed something. Plus the game is kinda filled with such sections and the final stage of the game, after you fight the final boss, is a run that's 60% jumping from wall to wall on a time limit. Since I had trouble with it, I started to notice that once you jump off the first wall immediately go into the slow motion mode and aim at the wall you want to dash to. This thing actually works perfectly allowing me to precisely jump from wall to wall pretty much without issue. So there's a protip right there.
The powers you get are also pretty cool. My favorite was the 4th one. Not gonna spoil it but it's really good. You also get it like 2 levels or so before the end. You also get a ranged attack (3rd power), that you can use to destroy not only enemies but also the blue sphere thingy that generates shields around them. The upgrades you get are also pretty cool and you can play around with them, like Tetris shaped and you can rotate them around to optimize your loadout.
Another pro tip: learn to parry and use an upgrade to reflect the projectile back to the enemy. This alone makes your life so much easier. You can parry every projectile with the exception of a late game enemy that shoots a different type.
There's also a ninja type enemy that utilizes a sword, just like you. Feels like Sekiro while dueling them. You get to a point where you'll face 5 of them at the same time. While you can use your powers to eliminate them easily from a distance (since they have no ranged attack) it's much more fun to take them out one by one in a sword fight.
Another enemy that is introduced in the final level of the game is one that can create 4 copies himself. You must use the slow motion mode to figure it out which is the right one. Killing him also kills the copies.
Overall, pretty fun game. Purely, 1000% reflex based and chaotic. But you can slow it down here and there and force some tactics down its throat. The lore is pretty good, the concept and I also liked the one hit kill system for both the player and the enemies. Wish more games would incorporate that.