Ghostrunner

• Genre: First-Person Action Platformer
• Spoiler Free Review: Yes.
• Time Played: 
• Too Short/Long: Feels about right.
• Soundtrack: When you're stuck in an area you may have to hear a track for a long time, thankfully the loops are pretty solid and do well to not feel too repetitive. The music is pretty damn good, but it is just kind of a bunch of high energy electronic loops. 
• Why I played: I wanted to be a Cyber Ninja That Climbs The City... in 4k.
• Did I cry: No, not exactly an emotional story.
• Jank: Sometimes the footholds can be a little janky. Getting caught on weird platforms, objects jutting out, etc. Not that there are many, but other first person platformers feel a bit smoother.
• Difficulty: It is extremely difficult. This goes in the bin of most difficult games I've played.
• Recommend to others: I would recommend it very selectively. People who like a challenge and the type of games that present each area as a trial you have to play repeatedly to figure out. This one is a little different because the levels are far longer than typical speed running trial games, but it still includes leaderboards and such.

Ghostrunner is a damn tough game. It's got the bones of a trial/speed running game, but most trial/speed running games have pretty short levels. It's something like that combined with a more traditional level design. Some levels are pretty lengthy and take awhile, but checkpoints are pretty generous, so it's not arduous to retry areas.

While some of the areas are really on point with the cyberpunk aesthetic, and you have a cyberspace environment you visit from time to time, a lot of the game is just general metal+industrial areas, a lot of weird sewers and ducts and rafters and stuff like that, it kind of blends in together. One other thing that's kind of odd is the scale. It always feels like you're crouching, even though you can crouch/slide. Compared to a lot of objects in the environment, you seem really small. Though sometimes you feel too big compared directly to say, a chair. I feel like scale is very important for first person games. Not necessarily for immersion, if that's something that's important to you, but just for judgement and sense of placement, etc. Otherwise there is this just uncanny feeling as you maneuver around.

I still really liked it. It was at it's best when it presented a new challenge in a unique way or a gimmick. It did a good job at mixing it up from time to time, but I feel like they could have done a bit better. A lot of the areas were just "Enemies are set up in an annoying way, stay alive and figure out how to kill them all." Which brings me to my next point. I played like 70% of the game thinking "Damn this game would be so much more fun if you didn't instantly die anything happened. If only I could take a single hit before dying it would be so much better."

Lo and behold, assist mode offers an option to have a single-hit shield. This game is constantly telling you what a badass you are. You are playing a Ghostrunner, an elite perfect combination of genetics and engineering. Yet, everything kills you instantly. It kind of ruins the feeling of feeling like a badass. Turning on the single-hit shield changed the game for me. I still died, a lot. The game is constantly getting more difficult and it's not gradual. I usually try to play games on "normal difficult" as it's the way the game is intended to be played(via many in-game descriptions), and I do have fun with a challenge, but I think this game is objectively more fun with this option on. It didn't change any other aspect of gameplay, just gives you the ability to take a single hit(except from environmental damage) before dying.

Anyway, I already started the second game, as part of my reason for finally playing this was because I got the second and I think they did a lot to balance and improve upon this one, but I'm a little burned out on it generally so I'll likely move on to something else before coming back to Ghostrunner 2. I liked it overall, it was just a little exhausting.