Ghostrunner

The good: -Graphics -Music -Art/visuals -The idea behind the gameplay mechanics, but not its implementation The bad: -Boring, cliche story, uninteresting characters -Repetitive, environment never changes - every level looks basically the same -Too difficult, zero margin for error, no ability to adjust difficulty -Frequent crashes that force you to redo extremely difficult levels over and over Angry Rant: Never before has a game made me feel visceral hatred towards it. When it's not crashing, it runs very smoothly and looks great. But then it crashes. I had over a dozen and a half crashes during my 14 hours of playthrough. My GPU is GTX970, the recommended card, and my cpu meets the minimum requirements. I dialled down the graphics settings. Still, it crashed multple times, forcing me to redo extremely difficult levels. It was enraging to the point of torture. The gameplay is so extremely difficult that it is punishing. Every level, every step you take, everything has to be perfectly timed and choreographed to make it through the level. One mistake - boom, you die. Instant death. No margin for error. You are forced to redo the same segment over and over for over a hundred times per level. How is this supposed to be fun? This is a game for masochists. Perhaps I wouldn't hate this game so much if I didn't force myself to finish it, but once I start something I have to finish it, so I endured the torture. Also, I already dumped money on it. To the level designers: what were you thinking when you designed that spinning laser thing? Heck, the entire game. What were you thinking?!! And to think there's a hardcore mode after the regular game. You gotta be kidding me. Allow us to adjust the difficulty, fix the random crashes, and my 1/5 star becomes a 4/5.

Like the Mirrors Edge games, this is fun...when you can zip effortlessly around and keep that sweet momentum going. Basically it's Portal + Mirror's Edge + Furi, with the self-contained areas and puzzle solving of the former (except the puzzle is combat), the momentum/running of the second, and the irritating boss design and wildly unfocused writing of the latter. The writing gets a -37 out of 5 stars. I mean, it would've been way better with no writing. On every level. Just skip the story and give us fun gameplay without the bad exposition. None of the bosses have that momentum you get from running around, you get dumped in an arena and have to figure out their gimmicks while slowly moving around. The boss design is garbage. The game is beautiful and I love the design (except for the last area). Meh soundtrack. The puzzles and collectibles ruin the flow of the game and are pointless. The entire point of the game is to keep going, not to stop and look behind every crate. Some areas are not well designed for combat. Rather than zooming around, you have to wait for platforms or use stealth, which is not this game's strong suit. A lot of the difficulty is fake RNG-based stuff. Beating this game isn't a matter of "git gud," it's a matter of figure out the enemy pattern and throw yourself at it enough times that you don't screw it up. Slight tweaks (lower cooldowns, a one-hit shield, etc.) could've fixed this; the "one-shot-death" design works against the game because you get bogged down repeating some areas. The platforming/grapple system sometimes kills you for no reason. The upgrade system is dumb. When you die, you can respawn instantly (as in, the game is optimized really well for that). For some rooms this means fun "learning the room." For others, it means dying 100x for no reason. TL;DR: buy it on sale, enjoy the running, ignore everything else. You will die a lot. Zoom zoom is fun. Game is only a couple hours long.

This game was really suprising. The platorming, and combat were so smooth and satisfying in this game. If you want to play as a badass cyborg jumping through a dystopian futuristic town, rife with a solid variety of enemies, this is your game. While you always die in one hit, and enemies can behave differently from how one would be used to them behaving in other action games, the game is not too unforgiving. The enemies are quite predictable all things considered, and they also die in one hit with the exception of the bosses. Finally, the game runs on a checkpoint system, and it does not make you repeat a lot of content if you die. All in all, this was a huge blast. I died many times, but it never got tedious to the point that it wasn't fun for me. The story and characters are quite decent too, though they're not a huge focal point.

Whoever designed the assist mode for this game is a genius and should be complimented as such, it’s done beautifully, doing enough for people who didn’t want to deal with how challenging the “normal” mode is, without sacrificing what’s fun about the game, plus the fact that you can tweak and customize things like how slow the slow motion in the air is, or how quickly does your charge recharges makes things even better. The story is fantastic and as you progress it becomes deeper and deeper, there are very few characters but everything is presented so beautifully written and in such a well-paced manner that for the most part you end up loving them all, even the one’s that may appear to be overly robotic and with a complete lack of character end up turning out to be charming and humorous, whilst also retaining a mystery to them, making you want to know more about them without getting to anxious to know more about them. The gameplay is quick and violent, gory and satisfying, extremely empowering and adrenaline pumping, you dodge through the air, cut throw bullets, afterwards you obtain abilities and the gameplay that already was satisfying enough gets even more profound, after a while, once you get into the rhythm of the game, you’ll flow through the game’s mechanics, slowing time down and dodging shots only to then land and cut an enemy in half, dash across the ground towards an enemy, wall run towards them and then decapitate them, all the while you’re filling up with every kill your abilities. If there’s anything wrong that I found with the game was some missions that were composed with some boring puzzles that hampered the pacing of the game rather than help it, plus there was also the horribly implemented ray tracing that destroys the game’s performance; but frankly these issues aren’t that big of a deal when you consider what’s in store for you here to experience. I couldn't write my whole review here, but I can say enough; thank you for assist mode!

... but man, did I suck at it. Had lots of fun, but I am trash at platformers/parkour games. Runs beautifully on a 3070 RTX. Worth the time if you're better at movement puzzles and dodging telegraphed attacks or can learn those things easily.