Reviewed for: Playstation 4
I imagine it's something of a shared dream: to be an awesome cybernetic ninja doing parkour and slicing dudes up in a Bladerunner-inspired neon cyberpunk setting. If that doesn't sound awesome to you, then you just aren't going to like the subject of today's review, Ghostrunner. If it does sound awesome, well...stay with me for a while, hear what I have to say, then make your purchase decisions accordingly. Ghostrunner seemed to appear out of the marketing ether a month or so ago with little fanfare, at least as far as I know. Until a month or so ago, I'd never heard of this game in spite of it being published by 505, a publisher who likes money enough to lie about not being able to provide free next-gen upgrades for Control. Why such a greedy publisher would drop the ball on marketing for one of its products is beyond me, but I guess no company really wants to bet the farm on small-ish Unreal Engine games like this. But once I did hear about it, I instantly put it and the release date in my list of things to keep an eye out for, because the little previews that were out made it seem like it was going to provide a simulation of that shared dream I mentioned at the start of this paragraph. Well, now I've gotten to experience it, and now that I have, I can't help but continue to wonder why 505 kept this thing so muted in the marketing sphere, considering what an astounding achievement Ghostrunner is.
You see, Ghostrunner is the world's first luck-based platformer, and it's also a game that I may very well hate more than The Last of Us: Part II! That's truly an astounding achievement!
So this is where the facade drops. I implore of you, dear reader, do NOT believe the weeaboos and Commentocracy subjects who say that this dumpster fire of a product is anything other than a dumpster fire. I hate this game. I hate it so much that the process I decided on for writing this review was to write a first draft with as much jaw-dropping profanity as I felt like, then going in, taking it out, and sophisticating the rest as much as possible...I mean, I didn't end up actually doing it all that much, but that's still the process I decided I'd use! So let's get this over with.
Let's start with the things wrong with the platforming sections. A critical part of platforming is using your dash ability to close some of the gaps between objects, but the issue is that your dash never feels remotely useful enough. 95% of the times when I'd use the dash to try and reach a ledge, it would move me forward a miniscule amount (without keeping me from continuing to fall, by the way), then I'd suddenly slow down a little bit after the dash ended, and I'd almost always find that it wasn't enough to reach the next area. I can already hear people telling me that it wouldn't be realistic to have the dash be more "videogame-y" and fun, but the obvious counterargument is that running along walls isn't realistic either. Then there are the platforming sections that also require you to do things like throwing shurikens to cut off power to obstacles. In theory this would be a thrilling added level of challenge, but in practice, the aiming of said shurikens is far too imprecise and inconsistent. Sometimes throwing in the general vicinity of a power node causes the shuriken to auto-aim, sometimes throwing exactly at a power node causes it to miss and instead fly off to where you would've been aiming the second after you pressed the throw button. This imprecision and inconsistency sadly also extends to the moment-to-moment platforming maneuvering itself, though to be fair, it doesn't really show its ugly side until the final level...but we'll get to that abomination in the next section. Essentially, where you think you're going to jump and with what ferocity isn't always on the money, and in particularly challenging platforming segments (such as the final level), it can be maddening. Perhaps this is an issue that comes with playing this on the PS4. With controller sticks not being as immediately responsive as a mouse, that's definitely a possibility. But a problem with the version I played is a problem with the version I played, so that's that. When the platforming is at full pace and everything is actually working as intended, however, it's thrilling beyond belief.
That brings us to the combat problems. For starters, in games like this where you die and can respawn immediately, there tends to be an emphasis on learning the situations (whether in combat or platforming) and really hammering down your moment-to-moment strategy. Ghostrunner's combat scenarios obviously missed the memo on this, unfortunately. Actually, it would be more fair to say that it misses the memo about half the time. When the game's systems are on point, combat fits the structure I laid out. You'll run through the battlefield learning where enemies are located and what parkour opportunities can be utilized to dispatch them, then you'll probably die quite a few times until you work out a plan that succeeds. However, there are several times where things don't quite work that way. For starters, the AI in this game is woefully inconsistent. In games like this, a key part of coming up with a plan is, over the course of many deaths, determining what enemies that pose what kinds of threats will notice you and start attacking from what kinds of distances. If, for example, there's a pistol enemy to the right who will notice you after you take two steps into the arena and a machine gun enemy who won't notice you until you start running on a wall halfway into the arena, your plan would probably involve picking off the pistol enemy first, perhaps making a plan to launch your attack before you've taken that second step into the arena. But what, pray tell, do you do when, for whatever reason, this enemy starts to notice you the millisecond you step inside after a couple attempts? By that point, your muscle memory might be to take one step, grapple up to cause the enemy to see you, jump from the grapple point at the last second so that he locks on to the grapple point and misses his shot, then kill him as you land. But then, when the AI suddenly notices you at a different time, it might go more like: you step into the arena, enemy sees you, you grapple up as he's lining up his shot, and then by the time you reach the top of the grapple point he's locked on and you die. See, all enemies in this game (except for the machine gun ones, thankfully) also have pinpoint accuracy, and this make the inconsistencies in the AI all the more infuriating. When I say pinpoint accuracy, you might think I mean they're really good at determining where you're going to go, but that would be too realistic. If I had to give one piece of advice to people just getting started in the game (other than "get a refund"), I'd tell them "the muzzle flash is not the shot, it's when they start tracking." In other words, it isn't that enemies predict where you're going to go, it's that they spend a solid second and a half with their guns trained on your exact location, and this tracking period ends when the bullet leaves the gun. There's a bit more leeway when enemies are further away, but a solid 80% of the time you'll be close enough that bullets make contact the second they're fired. With that in mind, the way that you survive these encounters is by dashing out of the way at the literal last second if you're on the ground or shifting your momentum out of the bullet's way if you're in mid-air. This was clearly intentional, so it isn't like this pinpoint accuracy is some kind of bug, but if you're going to program a gameplay loop so dependent on precision, then that's all the more reason why AI consistency is so important. The lock-on timing becomes part of the plan and part of the muscle memory. If it seems like I'm spending an awful lot of time on this subject, it's because this is what killed me 90% of the time. Most of the time things would go as follows: Over the course of, say, 20 deaths, I'd come up with a plan that was sure to succeed. Then, occasionally, I'd screw something up in subsequent attempts that I would be the first to take the blame for. Then the AI would suddenly start behaving differently, and it was a crap shoot each time to determine whether or not they'd go back to normal in the next run or if they'd once again take on a different behavioral pattern. Eventually, if the AI started behaving as I'd come to expect (and if I didn't screw something up myself), the plan I'd come up with in the first place would succeed. But it hardly ever felt like a victory. You may recall that I opened this section up by stating that success only felt good sometimes. That's because far too often, yes, I'd succeeded with a plan I'd concocted, but because of the game's awkward AI programming, there was this giant wall of frustration that simply delayed the inevitable. And, well...we're just getting started on what's wrong here.
Most of the remaining combat problems are a bit on the smaller (or even nitpicky) side, so I'll go ahead and get those out of the way now. Firstly, unless you're running on walls, you never quite feel fast enough. I don't know if it's a visual feedback phenomenon where, because you're looking at the wall you're running on, you can see the surface beneath you disappearing in a way that you don't when you're on the ground, or if the devs really did just make your run speed slower than your parkour speed. Either way, despite the many frustrations that come with combat, I felt like a badass cyborg ninja when I was running on walls, but the second I landed back on the ground things felt infinitely lamer. That's one of the more nitpicky problems, but it's one that was constantly on my mind. Another thing that was pretty consistently on my mind is that it's incredibly difficult to tell a lot of enemies apart until you're either right in their faces or until they start attacking. As I write this I'm realizing that I haven't yet discussed how upgrades work in Ghostrunner, so this complaint actually provides a place to organically talk about it! You essentially have a grid of a certain amount of square spaces and a growing set of upgrades that come in certain Tetris-style arrangements of squares. You can apply as many upgrades as you can Tetris into this grid, and the grid grows as you progress through the game. But it's a tradeoff, because the more empty space you have on the grid, the more quickly your "focus" recharges, meaning that less upgrades means more chances to use special abilities...which we'll get to. But for now, back to the complaint that led us to this discussion. See, enemies are, by default, hard to distinguish from the backgrounds, so one of the upgrades you can select gives enemies a red overlay for added visibility (which begs the question of why the devs didn't design these enemies with cool neon cyberpunk armor or something in the first place, but I digress). I had this upgrade equipped throughout my time playing, because the last thing I needed was to not be able to tell where enemies were. Unfortunately, with or without this upgrade, as I said, unless you're too close to comfort or under attack, few enemies can be differentiated by looks alone. That guy in the distance could be a pistol guy, could be a machine gun guy, could be a sword guy at a weird angle, and you simply don't know, even with the added visibility overlay. Again, it isn't a huge issue, but it's horrific design, plain and simple. The last smaller problem to discuss is what critics have historically tended to call "WTF killed me" syndrome. Because this is a first-person experience, because you're often surrounded on all sides by enemies, and because enemies have that aforementioned pinpoint accuracy, a lot of the time, you'll get killed by something you don't see. This is an issue that I don't feel as strongly about as some of the other things I've mentioned simply because in a game like this, WTF killed me syndrome can serve as a call to re-think your strategy. However, I do still take issue with how it's handled because, let's say you can somehow tell you got killed from behind. Where from behind? What enemy had locked onto you? When did this enemy notice you so that they could shoot you when they did? To some degree this made me occasionally rethink strategies, but it was never incredibly helpful in doing so.
Now, there's one last strictly gameplay thing that we have to discuss before we move on to other things, and that's the skills you unlock throughout the game. There are essentially four of these skills, each triggered by pressing the L3 button and each with a usefulness level of either useful or pointless...no inbetween. Firstly, there's the blink skill. When you trigger this, time slows down to allow you to aim at a line of enemies, and when you've got your targets in sight and press the attack button, you blink forward (passing through any bullets along the way) and kill all the enemies you'd locked onto in a single slash. Then, there's the force push, which I feel is self explanatory, but the thing I'll say is that it's instantaneous (as opposed to the other skills which come packaged with a time slowdown aiming period). Then there's the anime-style distance sword slash...you know, where you swing your sword and a crest of energy flies off in the direction you swung? Like the blink, this skill starts with time slowing down to allow you to lock onto enemies in a line and executes when you next press the attack button. Finally, there's the brain hacking. With this skill, the time slowdown gives you the space to target a single enemy, and when you launch the skill, that enemy will fight on your side for a certain amount of time. As I hinted at earlier, using these skills requires "focus," which is generated slowly over time and much more quickly by killing enemies. The rate at which the focus gauge fills, as I mentioned, is determined by the amount of free space on your upgrade board. So if you find that you're relying on skills to get through combat encounters, you might focus on only equipping upgrades you desperately need, for example...but you might as well not bother, because the only one of those skills that even remotely comes in handy is the force push. It's instantaneous, certain upgrades can allow it to instantly recharge if you kill more than one enemy with it, and above all else, it doesn't rely on this game's skill aiming system (which works fine for the brain hacking, but the skill itself just doesn't come in handy very often). For the blink and the anime slash, whether or not the skill lands isn't dependent on where you're aiming, it's dependent on if it successfully locked on, and the lock on system can best be described as a stereotypical passive-aggressive girlfriend. You'll have, say, three enemies directly in your sight in perfect positioning to land a blink or sword slash and launch the attack from there, but because you didn't move your reticle over them in the exact way that Ghostrunner wanted you to (without telling you what it wanted in the first place), the attack doesn't land. Seriously, if you fire off the anime slash at a group and one of them didn't physically get a lock-on notice, you'll watch as the animation for the slash goes through that one enemy with no effect, so petty are the systems at work here. So yeah, every skill except for the force push is useless, and worse than that, trying to use the other skills is a chore at the best of times.
Let's start with the bosses. I actually disagree with Yahtzee Croshaw's opinion on them. Though they are all awful, in my opinion they get better as the game goes on, though that may just be because they become less and less frustrating. I'd like to center my ramblings about the bosses on just the first one, which is easily the worst. Essentially, the boss is a laser defense system with four phases. In the first phase, you start about halfway up the arena's height and grapple your way up to the top of the system to cut off one of the support beams, dodging lasers as you go. You grapple through something like 5-8 platforms, having to stay on your toes every second to be sure you're timing your jumps so that you're dodging both the lasers at your feet and those above you. If you mess up even once and get hit by a laser or fall, you start over from the very beginning. Oddly enough, the last couple of platforms are easily the easiest ones to time, but the first couple ones have the same inconsistency as the enemy AI. The lasers are continuously moving, even when you die, so when you respawn, they aren't going to be in the same positions. So for the first couple of platforms, it's virtually impossible to time your grapples accurately, so you'll die there a lot, but once you get closer to the top, the lasers are far more predictable. Once you cut off that first support beam, you fall to the very bottom of the system, and phase 2 begins. Your goal in this phase is to get back up to where you started (halfway up the arena height), this time by running along segmented wall plates and grappling to platforms in a spiral formation...oh, and the defense system changes things up in this phase by sending waves of energy up the walls every second. You're safe while grappling and while on platforms, but the challenge comes when you start running along those segmented wall plates. The surges of energy pass over the plates literally on the second every second, so your timing has to be extremely precise, and when you succeed, it usually goes as follows: wait for the surge to pass just above where on the plate you're going to run, jump and start running for 3/4 of a second, jump off the wall right as the surge reaches you, shift your momentum in mid-air to fling yourself back at the wall, start running again, and maybe rinse and repeat those last couple steps if it's a longer stretch of wall plate. In theory, this would be a great test of precision, but in practice, what constitutes being hit by the surge is pretty inconsistent. There'd be times I thought I'd acted too early, and I would very clearly touch the red animation, but I wouldn't die. Other times, I'd jump to do the momentum thing well before it looked like the red was going to touch me, only to end up dying as I jumped. I was already very frustrated by the end of the first phase, and as I made my way through the second, I was almost growling through clenched teeth because I was so angry. Because of the frequency of the surges, I would end up dying within 1-3 seconds every single time. The stats at the end of the level showed me that I died over 150 times to this boss, and the majority of those deaths took place in phase 2. Once again, dying at any point in this phase meant starting from the beginning of the phase, and unlike the first one, things didn't get any easier the further along I went. So keeping in mind that I was dying within a matter of seconds each time, it eventually got to the point that every 1-3 seconds, someone listening through my walls would hear "...F**K!....S**T!....GODD*MN MO*sigh*...F**ING F**ING!!" with me getting progressively louder and angrier each time. Sometimes the auditory voyeur in question would hear just a single prolonged "F**********************K!" starting at a lower register and ending on a sharp high. Adding to the immense frustration that came over me during this phase is something I haven't yet touched on: if you die during a line of dialogue, when you respawn, that line repeats from the beginning. For whatever reason, the devs thought it would be a good idea to have a robotic voice come in every minute to say something like "Emergency! Threat Level blabbityblah, whatever." So, what did this mean in practice? It meant that every minute or so, I'd get to hear "emer...emergen....em...emer....em...emergency! thr...eme....e....emerge....emergenc.....emergen...e...em...e....emergency! threat le...e...em" where every "..." represents the millisecond it takes to respawn, and the only way to make it stop was to get far enough without dying for the line to complete. None of the strings of profanity I mentioned were all that loud (mostly vicious grumbles under my breath), so that person listening through my walls would just barely be able to make out the words. However, when I eventually was frustrated to the point of literally yelling "SHUT UP!" at the voice and scaring the crap out of my poor dog who was peacefully sleeping next to me, they wouldn't have needed to try very hard to hear it. Compared to phase 2, the next two phases were also frustrating but not nearly to the same level, and I don't want to talk about them because just writing about phase 2 has given me a headache. After I finally beat that boss, I turned the game off both red-faced from anger and utterly ashamed at how much it had gotten under my skin, and sadly, this would be the case for the rest of my time with the game. I don't know if this boss just left such a bad taste in my mouth that the negatives that were just blemishes on an otherwise good experience until that point became unbearable, or if the negatives just ended up coming more and more into play after this boss. But the fact of the matter is that it was all downhill from there. Every single night when I decided to put Ghostrunner away from that point on, it was never because I was satisfied. Rather, it was because I was going to pop a blood vessel or accidentally crush my controller between my hands, and as I've already said, I would feel utterly ashamed of it every single night without fail. Something about the amount of negatives at play here and how frustrating they are just gets under my skin in a way I've literally never experienced before, but if you think that extremely long bit of rambling about how horrible the boss experience in this game is, that's nothing compared to the final level.
After you beat the final boss, you have to get through one more level with a platforming focus, and this was the most unpleasant gaming experience of my entire life. This final level takes place in the cyberspace area that you occasionally take detours to. The cyberspace area is something you've likely seen before in science fiction: a computer program visualized in level design, if that makes sense. In these sections, the world is incredibly hard to make sense of (the game itself makes a point of emphasizing this in a line of dialogue) because of the somewhat see-through nature of most of the assets and because of how much every surface...shifts? blinks? glitch in the matrix, that kind of thing? I'm not great at describing it, but given what I've said, does it sound like the kind of place to put your most brutally precision-but-really-luck-based platforming challenges? Every platforming challenge in this level is an absolute nightmare painted with a backdrop of migraine-inducing visual sci-fi diarrhea and artificially driven along by a Fortnite-style shrinking red dome that will kill you if it makes contact, ensuring that you have no time to plan out your paths before you start them. One kind of platforming challenge that is both newly introduced in this level and repeated ad-nauseum in it is a puzzle in which you have staggered wall run platforms flying toward you on the left and the right, and your goal is to hop between left platform and right platform while still moving forward until you reach a checkpoint on the other side of an unforgivably large abyss. I don't have an exact count, but I know that the first of these challenges took me upwards of an hour to complete, with me getting angrier and angrier each time. In this session, however, I was trying to keep things under control, so I would think, "what am I doing wrong here? Surely there's something I'm not learning from this." See, what was going wrong consistently was something I briefly mentioned earlier: that it's kind of a crap shoot whether you leap off confidently towards another platform or just kind of limply leap forward and slightly in the direction you wanted. Sometimes I would jump exactly as I needed to, sometimes I would drastically overshoot and end up glitching into the platform I was meant to be running on, sometimes it would be like I hadn't jumped at all. So after thinking it over, I thought "maybe the limp jump means I'm jumping too late, and maybe the glitch jump means too early." I tried to use the synth music in the background as a guide. I would run for x amount of a second, jump, x amount of a second, jump, and that worked well enough....sometimes. Even this approach was inconsistent. So I tried paring it with the most decisive possible flicks of the thumbstick in the direction I wanted to jump, but again, no consistency. It seemed like even when my theories were working, there would be an inconsistency in platform spacing or where exactly on the platform I'd land while following the same procedure for each platform. And as mad as I got during the aforementioned boss fight, it was nothing compared to the anger I felt during this segment...but eventually I got through it somehow. I let out an enormous sigh/growl of relief and got through the next couple of challenges with relative ease. But then...it happened. A second iteration of the challenge from hell, this time with the added headache of obstacles to dodge. I let out a truly heartbroken (not angry) "no-ho-ho! come on..." and dug my heels in, knowing it was going to be a bumpy ride. I faced many of the same tribulations I faced during the first iteration of this challenge, and I found myself feeling more than a little irked when I learned that every couple of deaths, the exact placement of platforms and obstacles would change, so there was actually no way to get an exact feel for timing or strategy. Still, I persisted. Fastforward another hour and I had to put the controller down to do some breathing exercises because I was starting to feel sick from both the anger effect and the sensation of having to watch the visual diarrhea happen for so long. When I came back, I started to have a bit more success, but continued inconsistencies ensured I was there banging my head against the wall for another full hour. Three full hours and I hadn't gotten to the end of the level. I decided I would put it down and give it another shot the next day, and if you've already played the game, chances are good you just said "oh no" to yourself. For those who haven't yet played the game, why do you think those who have might say that to themselves? Simple: While you respawn from checkpoints if you die in the game, if you quit the game, you lose every last bit of your progress in the current level. So when I came back to Ghostrunner the next day with a fresh set of patience and a willingness to see it through, I found that I'd been kicked back to the start of the level. And then I decided that was it. I didn't finish Ghostrunner, nor do I have any desire to humor this amateur hour Youtuber-bait dumpster fire any longer. After all, if one could lose three hours worth of progress by voluntarily exiting to the main menu through the game's own systems, imagine what might happen if, say, ohhhhhh I don't know...the game crashed?
Let us review:
Horrific boss encounters - 1.0
Horrific final level - 1.0
AI and platforming inconsistency - 1.0
Skill aim inconsistency - 0.5
Progress loss with mid-level exits - 1.0
Crashes/Unresponsive buttons/framerate issues - 1.0
The final score for Ghostrunner is...
4.5/10 - Slightly Below Average
For shame, One More Level, for shame!
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