Ghostrunner

This game is less a test of skill and more of you learning the exact sequence the game wants you to play it in. When you get it right it feels super good but until then it's like hitting your head against the brick wall. I have reached the first boss in the game, which is essentially high-speed parkouring against a rotating barrage of lasers and I just about hit my tipping point. I no longer think this game is fun. Objectively this is a well made and gorgeous game that more than deserves the support but I think I'm bowing out at this point. Even Sekiro had more mercy than this.

It's good: - As a CS surf and Titanfall player, this is exactly the kind of movement I'm looking for in a fast-paced 3D action game. There's wallrunning, sliding and a dash similar to Dishonored's blink. You can slow time by jumping + holding dash to take a breather. - Enemies one hit you and you one hit them. You will quickly get back to where you were. It's similar to Hotline Miami where you repeat levels frequently, but you aren't set back that far and each room is like a puzzle that you need to figure out. - The game feels very consistent and if you die, you usually know what you could have done better. - Darksynth soundtrack by Daniel Deluxe is on point. Some criticism: - There are puzzle sections which range from mildly interesting to slightly annoying, the last puzzle is and especially confusing maze, where you will just get lost and get through it by trial and error. It kind of interrupts the action flow, but adds some variety and a break to the pacing. - The voice acting is good, but the story is mediocre and mostly told as your running through the game. - The city only feels like a level, kinda dead, not like it's lived in or has much purpose. It looks good in most parts, less so in others. It's just a super polished CS surf map. - There are no story decisions or interactions with in-game characters, besides slicing up the baddies. I know, it's an action platformer, not an RPG... - During the lab level I had some FPS stuttering, but was fine again, after restarting the game - I got lost twice because I missed a door and started going backwards through the level. It's really empty when you get lost and it can take a couple minutes to find the way again - Most deaths because bad timing with parry against one enemy where u can't slow time The main game is quite short, I finished it under 8 hours in two play sessions, but it still has some replayability with the time attack mode, new game plus and trying to find secrets you missed on your first playthrough.

This was a 5 star game from me, up until near the end of the campaign, when its issues became more and more obvious. But let's start with the good: The graphics are great, the gameplay and movement are fun, and the game is very challenging. This doesn't become frustrating, as there are no loading times and the checkpoints are mostly fair, with one bossfight being a strange exception. Therefore, trying different approaches to combat arenas in fast succession is no problem. But why only three stars? 1. Because of the inconsistencies with the AI. One might approach a situation twice exactly the same way, but the AI will act completely different: Sometimes an enemy notices you while running along a wall, sometimes he ignores you. Of course, one might argue, this is similar to actual human behaviour. But the AI is completely stupid in every other way and doesn't even change position when the player leaves their line of sight. Those inconsistencies are frustrating and make planning an approach unnecessary hard. 2. The parcour doesn't work. Of course, the system isn't completely broken, but several times I fell to my death because my character decided to simply not run on the wall or ignore a ledge he could have easily reached. This becomes extremly obvious in the games final level. 3. Checkpoint system: The system itself is fair, but when one closes the game and continues the next day, one has to replay the entire level. 3. Optimisation: Even though a driver update fixed some issues, the game crashed from time to time. I had to disable Raytracing in the third to last level, as it drops the fps into the 50s (with an RTX3080). DLSS did nothing. Earlier levels run fine though and look beautiful. 4. I won't criticize the difficuly, but the studio should take into account that they exclude people with slow reflexes and disabilities. Despite my criticism, I think Ghostrunner is a great game. I would love to give it 5 stars one day, when the issues are fixed.

Let me just start off by saying this is 100% my style of game. Fast paced, skill-based, challenging, combat heavily based on movement... I think they really nailed it. I died quite often but it was my fault every time. Thanks to the fast and frequent checkpoints, it rarely annoyed me. There are a few puzzles every now and then when you enter the "virtual place". Most of them are fine and relatively short... However, the one with the rotating platform was probably the most frustrating and poorly executed.

I need to stress this up front: The core gameplay is RAD AS HELL. When everything is working as it should and you're parkouring around as a cyberninja in a breathtakingly realised industrial hellscape, a hairsbreadth from death and having to be on top of your game to pull through, it's fantastic. Genuinely incredible. It's fast, fluid, it demands your best with a strict but strictly fair challenge, and it doesn't punish you for failing - restarting an encounter is quick and seamless, almost always putting you in the same room, with no downtime before getting back into the thick of things. But. But, that 'strict, but strictly fair' challenge the game demands of you is undermined by how too often you'll fail not because you slipped up, but just because of janky bullshit in the physics and environment. It's one thing for an enemy to catch you out, or to mistime a jump, it's another to drop on an enemy, find they were a hair outside the invisible targeting of your cut, and so bounce off past them either into a pit or to get shot in the back. The problem is not that the game is hard. It IS hard, but it wants to be hard in a very respectable way, and unfortunately it's just a bit too janky around the edges for everything to work as it should, as consistently as it should. There have been far too many times when I've died to the environment because the parkour and grappling system are built around a fancy realistic physics system that occasionally does something totally off its shit due to the angles and timing and whatever the hell, and throws me into hazards that were clearly meant to be just set dressing for that section, not actual obstacles. This doesn't actually happen all that often in the grand scheme of things, but it happens often ENOUGH to be noticeable and frustrating. It's good! It's fun! But whenever the physics engine flips out I think, "at least when N: Way of the Ninja did this, I could excuse it by dint of that being a freeware flash game from 2004."