There are many ways you can describe the action platformer game Ghostrunner. But have you heard it being described as “real-time Superhot with ninja parkour” or “soulslike levels of punishment but with an insta-restart of Trackmania”?
With Ghostrunner 2, developer One More Level decided to up the ante by expanding its scope just a bit with larger set-pieces and more tools to test and hone your skills at jumping over platforms and killing enemies as a character that immediately dies in one hit. At its heart is still a slick, thrilling ride that can be rewarding for those looking for mastery, but completable for those who may lack skill but can persevere.
Presentation
Ghostrunner 2 is set in a cyberpunk world and you know that immediately. If the cover art featuring a ninja-cyborg with yellow splashed all over hasn’t give it away, a few seconds of the trailers should be enough. Dark, dingy city crammed with buildings and neon signs. The thumping darksynth synthwave music. Chromed up humans. And for this sequel, there’s now bikes. Hallmarks of typical cyberpunk setting.
And this is typical cyberpunk, as in, the dark, brooding but sleek cyberpunk aesthetic you’d expect to see and not Cyberpunk the tabletop/CD Projekt Red game where there’s still essence of punk rock that puts the punk in cyberpunk. No rebellious guitar riffs here, but a lot of thumping synths.
And it’s clear how much they nail the cyberpunk aesthetic. Especially with the music. The original soundtrack would fit well in any darksynth music playlist with great use of not only menacing synths, but also organs. The synthwave music is so good that when in levels where it’s not there it made me clamour for it to come back. It helps so much more than just sell you an aesthetic, I’d argue it’s what makes the gameplay more fun (more on that later).
The game looks fantastic when it’s set in the cityscape. The city of Dharma Tower seems to be set in eternal night, but the rooftops you visit really checks all the list of what you’d expect from a cyberpunk city. In particular, the city is shiny and full of bright lights to accentuate the eternal darkness. Surprisingly, most of what I see in Ghostrunner 2 doesn’t even include ray-tracing (the effect is currently disabled at launch, but will be added to all platforms later). And with this game running smooth like butter easily hitting above 60 FPS on a 2019 mid-high spec laptop (9th-gen Intel i7, RTX 2060), I feel like that ray-tracing option should remain off even when the option stopes being greyed out. The game’s a looker as it is. Though, the environments outside of the city doesn’t conjure much emotion of out me. The cyberspace (“cybervoid” in this game) is rad, but the others not so much.
Ghostrunner 2 plays in the first-person so you don’t see much animation of your own player character, but the ones you see are good. The blade being twirled around as you jump and dash across platforms and walls. The satisfying sword swings and perfect parries. And enemy animations that’s clear enough to see and gauge their attack timing to get those parries.
There’s plenty of dialogue and voice overs in this game, but don’t expect anything special. It’s sufficient, I don’t think there’s a bad performance per se. But the “hang out at the hub” bits where you go talk to your allies can feel a bit stiff if you’re too used to seeing games with bigger budgets making this aspect feel more alive with motion capture and accurate lip-syncing.
Overall, if you’re a sucker for a cyberpunk aesthetic, Ghostrunner 2 delivers. Don’t expect this particular title goes hard on it all the time, but for most of the time it does it goes hard.
Gameplay
Ghostrunner 2 has you play as a Ghostrunner named Jack. After the events of the first game, it looks like a rebellious group called the Asura is now threatening the stability of the Dharma Tower. And now it’s up to Jack Ghostrunner and the climbers to stop them.
Story-wise there’s plenty of lore and story pieces for you to put together to understand exactly what’s going on, but the plotline itself isn’t anything too crazy or hard to keep up. There’s a recap of the first Ghostrunner story for those who need a refresher or those that didn’t play Ghostrunner and… it’s a bit too vague? As someone who didn’t play Ghostrunner I still didn’t get much of what happened in Ghostrunner from that recap. I learned more from the main plot as people bringing up past events.
Ghostrunner 2 has you control Jack in the first person. This cyberninja is a glass cannon. He can rup across walls, jump over big gaps, has what’s essentially a grappling hook, can pause time as he sets up his dash move (which yes, includes air dashes), can block bullets and attacks with his sword, and can kill almost anyone with one clean hit or perfect parry.
Jack also dies in one hit.
What makes Ghostrunner compelling is the one-hit-kill. It makes you feel like an utter badass that operates with clear-cut precision. But to make you feel that way, any mistake is punishable by instadeath.
Thankfully, you respawn almost instataneously, with generous checkpointing. Sure, some combat and platforming segments require you to them all in one go, but most of the time the checkpoint drops me back to a place I expected it to be. And when it was not, well, it takes a couple more respawns to adjust and get back to it.
The insta-respawn is Trackmania levels of fast. You’re not phasing out and phasing in to the world via a loading screen. No. You’re just pop back at the checkpoint. The song still loops continuously as if to say “hey, keep at it, don’t stop now”. It’s these little things that Ghostrunner 2 does to find that flow, find the rhythm to kill 20 or so enemies in one shot (or before getting one-shotted, more like). Even if you did die 40 times or more in that end-of-level combat encounter you eventually did do it, all in one take.
But that’s the thing. Ghostrunner 2 demands you to make the effort and get good eventually. And it certainly says so at the end of each level. I groaned looking at how the game keeps a timer and death counter, and I groaned louder when I realised it’s used as a leaderboard.
But I get it. Ghostrunner 2 is that kind of game. It appeals to the speedrunners and the “honers” who wants to master the gameplay to perfection. In that way, Ghostrunner 2 is a bona-fide action game. But at least, even a pleb with a skill issue like me can persevere their way into beating this game. So as hardcore as the game sounds, it’s not game-progress-blocking levels of hard. But it certainly is punishing. The skill floor is low to accommodate players of any level of skill, but ceiling is high to push the best players to master the blade to perfection.
There’s this feeling that Ghostrunner 2 has a bigger ambition with its main campaign. There’s a plot to unravel so you have quite the many chats as you parkour through levels. The level scope is bigger- in particular the two levels where you explore beyond Dharma Tower on the motorcycle, turning into a semi-open-world game. And there’s at least one surprise movement ability near the end that’s a welcome addition to Jack Ghostrunner’s trade.
And you know what, it works. The set-piece moments, the boss fights, the new environments you traverse all adds up into a thrilling ride that keeps you guessing what’s coming next. The game also gently introduces you to each new ability, incorporating them into parkour/platforming puzzles first, then lets you utilise them in combat. I always look forward to the end-of-level combat sequence where it’s always the toughest one in the level. As nailing it down correctly, using all the tools you have to its full potential and doing that cleanly, really makes you feel like a cyborg ninja effortlessly balling. Not counting however many attempts before that which all ends in a swift death.
There’s a skill system where you can install different perks, and it’s actually brilliant. The interface could have used a better explainer, but here’s how it works. You have up five rows and columns to slot in a perk, but by default each column can only be filled by chips of the same kind. If you commit to a column placing a Traversal chip, only that kind can be stacked on there. Each chip has a power cost.
The chips can be simple upgrades but there are some that gets even better if placed in a specific manner. Some require to be slotted at the top column- you start with not having all the rows and columns unlock, and the leaving a slot blanks also takes out a portion of your power budget so this means you don’t get overpowered early on quickly. Others require you to empty the slots on its side so you are forced to leave a space, or limits you to place no more than two chips in the slot, balancing out the extra power you get for doing so. Some perk chips also come with a disadvantage.
The skill system is secretly an attache case simulator but you are rewarded for slotting in the chips at the right places. The perks themselves, despite just being passive abilities, are game-changers, allowing you to fine-tune your playstyle and give you an advantage for doubling down on specific abilities at the cost of others. Especially to newcomers who haven’t grit their teeth enough to get good on skill alone.
Ghostrunner 2 can feel absolutely tight at times, but it’s not without moments where a jump or a grappling hook shot leads to you not making on the platform as intended. Sometimes a simple fall to death didn’t happen because I got stuck under some geometry. Or the checkpoint respawns you to a spot you’re not expected to respawn and immediately die again. Or the game hitching as it struggles to perform an effortless background loading, streaming assets so you don’t see a loading screen (even on an SSD). It can feel a bit janky at places. Though for the most part, it’s a smooth ride from start to end.
Content
Ghostrunner 2’s main campaign can take about 10 hours or so to complete, less so if you’re an experienced player from the first game. The campaign is bombastic, and even if you don’t care much for the story, it’s still a fun ride as the gameplay variety continues to shake things up from start to finish.
The levels are mostly linear, but expect optional hidden paths and puzzles to get your inner completionist go back and collect missing collectibles.
And if you prefer a lean, gameplay-focused experience with the story stripped out, there’s also Roguerunner.exe. It’s a roguelike mode where you are complete challenges in the cybervoid. It can be a parkour challenge or a combat challenge. There’s a Slay-The-Spire-style level select where each challenge connects to one or two challenges and you have to pick which reward you want (or which challenge to avoid). And you get to collect the perk chips as upgrades.
It’s a decent mode, though I admit to not putting in that much time in it. Not because it’s uninteresting. More so because it is hard. You unlock this mode rather early, and if you jump in at that point, you’ll only get the most of it if you’re already an experience Ghostrunner. So I can’t say how much variety of challenges it offers, but I can say that it is, indeed, challenging for newcomers. Something to look forward to when you’re done with the campaign and want a reason to jack in Jack again and do some ghosrtunning.
There’s no endless mode that uses the bike, not yet. Endless Moto mode is teased as part of the Ghostrunner 2 Season Pass (this game has a season pass, apparently), so maybe that’s the one, which will be available post-launch.
Personal Enjoyment
As a person who didn’t play Ghostrunner, and who dreaded punishing games like Ghostrunner, I am quite surprised I got into liking Ghostrunner 2 this much. It’s probably that I have grown accustomed to punishing games as of recently, but more likely is that the parkour and platforming elements are so satisfying when executed correctly. Those sequences are tight and makes me feel good for somehow nailing them at the first go.
The combat encounters are fun too. There’s plenty of ways to approach each encounter, but I find myself wanting to keep going on a gameplan and just refine that order of who dies to perfection. Even if it means dying over and over again. The insta-reload checkpointing keeps coming back to get everything right.
The story isn’t as compelling to really grab me, unfortunately despite the game’s best efforts. But the rush of going through the bike set-pieces, and the last sequence of levels where you unlock that other cool traversal ability is just something else.
I’m not sure if Ghostrunner as a series should commit to doing more open world levels, the one level where it lets you loose to drive around a desolate wasteland ended up with me getting lost and hoping the checkpoint respawns me toward the objective if I go far enough and die. But the bike, and that other thing, should be a series staple moving forward.
Overall, I enjoy my romp with Ghostrunner 2, more than I expected. The quality of the game shines through the occasional jank it may have.
Verdict
The follow-up to Ghostrunner successfully established a franchise. Ghostrunner 2 continues to hone its brand of punishing combat and platforming while exploring new ideas which resulted in more variety to this action platformer. A clever skill system and well executed action pieces will hook players until the end of the campaign, while a roguelike mode gives more experienced players reason to keep playing even after the credits roll.
Its story and setting adds nothing to the growing pantheon of great cyberpunk works. But the rest of the package sure does.
In a sea of great game releases of 2023, Ghostrunner 2 can fly high amongst them. If you’re willing to fight and die (and die again), you’ll enjoy this wild ride.
Reviewed on PC. Review copy provided by the publisher.
Ghostrunner 2
In a sea of great game releases of 2023, Ghostrunner 2 can fly high amongst them. If you're willing to fight and die (and die again), you'll enjoy this wild ride.
- Presentation 8.5
- Gameplay 9.5
- Content 8.5
- Personal Enjoyment 9.5