At the start of the game you are only armed with two things: Your Katana and your agility. The GhostRunner, named Jack by the people, can perform a short dash, slide and run on walls. Holding down the dash button while on the air will slow down time, allowing you to quickly move to the left or right before performing the forward dash, this is a technique that you'll need to use and abuse in order to clear some platforming challenges and slay baddies. Most enemies are armed with guns and the such, so running at them in a straight line is usually not the best course of action, so you'll have to use your jumps and the walls around you to approach from different angles before slashing them down.
The game offers a fair amount of enemies. There are your basic gun-tooting baddies that are simple to cut down, enemies with machineguns that you must be more careful with, ninjas that you must parry, by attacking just as they attack you, robots that shoot wide proyectiles you must be more careful with, etc. Sometimes it can feel a bit monotonous, since every enemy has a somewhat specific way of being tackled. On the other hand, since you can wall run on most walls and you can even use the air-dash to climb surfaces... if you are creative enough you can create your own shortcuts bypassing obstacles towards collectibles. Heck, during the first boss' first phase, I managed to find ways to skip portions of the obstacle run it forces upon you. This is something I thought was fantastic, and I don't know if they intended to allow the player so much freedom.
To aid you in combat you'll slowly unlock four powers that uses a focus gauge that you refill by mowing down enemies. If used properly, these can give you an edge in battle. The first one is a forward slash that can go through proyectiles and through enemies, then you get a force push, which was my go-to ability, then a slash that was very similar to the force push and then mind control. I thought mind control sounded lame, but it became very useful during some of the final combat challenges. You can also equip upgrades, through a tetris-grid system, to give yourself a few boosts. It's nothing game-changing, but in a game this tough everything helps. Getting your self a second dash is a must!
I thought the game did a fantastic job at balancing the amount of combat and platforming challenges, as the game is usually made up of a platforming challenge, then a combat challenge, then a platforming challenge and so on. While many sites cited the game as being around 9 hours that's an outright lie, the game is 4-5 hours at most, and this is coming from someone that died 277 times on the first boss. Oh, yes, the game keeps track of your deaths. Thankfully, retrying in this game is immediate, no loading times whatsoever besides 1 or 2 seconds while it resets everything, so dying doesn't become so annoying.
The game looks passable in docked mode, but in handheld mode.... it can be very, very ugly. The framerate held up 30fps rather well... at least until the suicide-bomber enemies showed up, the two stages featuring these had a horrendous framerate, for whatever reason. The game's plot is super predictable, but maybe the intended it to be so since it tries very hard to be as cyber punk as it can. And it succeeds in that. The wet, neon-lit rooftops and streets you go through are glorious, nailing the cyberpunk bit to perfection.
One of the game's biggest hurdles is getting used to the control scheme. R1 is jumping, R2 is Slashing, L1 is dashing, L2 is the grappling hook and A is sliding. During the first hour or so my fingers kept getting jumbled and I'd slash instead of jump or slide instead of slashing, etc. I felt that this added to th game's challenge, but eventually my fingers and my brain got used to it and the game became more fun to play.
But the game's BIGGEST hurdle is, definitely, how buggy it is. One big issue is that checkpoints are NOT savestates, so you can't save the game until you beat the stage. Which can be an issue with some of these bugs. There's a bug that's prevalent on every version: The game often crashes when going to the next stage. I had three crashes total, thankfully I never lost any progress with these. One time my air a dashes stopped working, which meant combat became unfairly tough and some platforming challenges downright impossible, and reloading the last checkpoint wouldn't solve it... forcing me to restart the entire stage. Another time, during the Train stage, my vision became blurry with a "REBOOTING" sign flashing in the centre. I was so late into the stage I just toughed it out, since at least my abilities were fully functional, but man, was it annoying. Another time I got stuck inside the environment, another time both my hand and blade turned black after reloading, and, sometimes, I feel like the GhostRunner wouldn't wallrun even though I clearly touched the wall. This game could've used a few more time in the oven, that's for sure.
Overall, I feel like GhostRunner is a decent game, and this is a passable port. It's a shame some levels couldn't held the 30fps better, but thankfully the rest of the game was much better. While the focus on speed and attacking from the air makes you think that this is a game about style, it being so hard only made me feel super lame, so I feel like an easier difficulty setting could've benefitted the game. While I know crashes happen in the other ports of the game, I don't know if they are as buggy as this one.
7.0
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