Ghostrunner 2 is a first-person action platformer from One More Level set in a cyberpunk dystopia where you slash, slide, ride, and glide throughout an enclosed megacity and its outskirts to prevent a growing terrorist uprising.
You play as Jack, a Ghostrunner or cybernetic ninja with amnesia, and due to your actions in the last game, the city is suffering from a massive power vacuum. All manner of fledgling factions are now looking to take control, including a newly emerged group of Ghostrunners thought to be dismantled who see you and your group as a tool of their oppression.
There’s a handy recap of the last game’s events in the extras menu but enough context is provided in the narrative to get you up to speed even if you skip it. This game’s story hits on a refreshing premise that suggests the fall of a ruthless dictator is not immediately followed by rainbows and sunshine. The supporting cast from the first game is joined by a few defectors from the old regime and the tensions between the groups now trying to work together make for intriguing drama, but many of the characters themselves are lacking any real distinctive personalities or designs. However, the band of enemy Ghosrunners don’t have that problem, as their overly dramatic rhetoric and displays of aggression keep events interesting.
WATCH THE GHOSTRUNNER 2 VIDEO REVIEW ABOVE
The hardcore and fast-paced action of Ghostrunner excels at giving you several simple tools paired with elaborate enemy and platforming challenges to make use of them. You can run on walls, grind on rails, slide on the ground, block and deflect projectiles with your sword and even change direction mid-air using bullet time. Active combat skills double as smart traversal tools that work your brain just as hard as your fingers as you swap between them in the heat of movement. You can equip and manage chips on your motherboard that specialize in certain skills providing passive bonuses to things like your stamina consumption or shuriken properties, allowing you to be better at the things you like. The addition of motorcycle sections and a wingsuit integrate surprisingly well with all your other skills, making for insanely cool strings of ninja techniques and parkour mayhem.
As powerful as you are, death is still easy to come by. Both you and enemies die in a single hit, so encounters push you to embrace perfection while clearing an arena. The quick restarts upon death temper a lot of frustration, and instead encourage you to master its combat puzzles by trying out new angles of attack and learning exactly what threats the enemies are to you in any given moment. Platforming and puzzle sections can be just as trying, but are amazingly fun with the game’s generous checkpoint system moving you along at a brisk pace.
Boss battles also make use of checkpointing which may have diluted a lot of their challenge, but this does seem necessary since they take multiple hits while you still die in one. Otherwise they are great spectacles that aren’t afraid to mix platforming into their designs rather than just combat.
Visually, Ghostrunner pulls off the cyberpunk aesthetic admirably and does a great job of making the environment look like an actual city rather than just a ninja’s playground. It hides a ton of collectables in small off-routes that can give you new weapon skins or background lore to dig through, and missions will tell you how much is left to find at their conclusion.
I was able to roll credits in just under 12 hours, but the desire to just play again and improve my times and deaths is noteworthy. There’s a roguelike mini game that lets you take on some pre-made virtual challenges, thrown at you in random configurations that I intend to spend a ton more time in. Ghostrunner 2 is a fantastic action platformer that provides spectacle, challenges and just plain fun the whole way through, and I can’t wait to see what’s next for the series. The game is out on October 26th for $39.99 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
