Just as before you’re Jack, a true glass cannon protagonist whose speed, agility, and ever-growing suite of techno-ninjutsu abilities is matched only by his constant fragility.
In Ghostrunner 2 you will enter a combat arena and die instantly. At the tap of a bottom (and with no loading) you’re back to try again. This time you might die after a few seconds. Rinse and repeat twenty times and suddenly you have a plan:
Wallrun, slowmo dodge, kill, grapple, deflect, kill, boost pad, shuriken toss, mid-air grapple, kill, slide, vault, slice your cyberkatana through a cyberfreak’s body as the two cyberhalves spiral through the air in front of you. Ah, endorphins. There you are…
You will die (a lot) but frustration is kept in check by instant respawning and instinctively learning the timing of the encounter: as if you have precognition of what each enemy is about to do.
All that said, everything above could equally apply to Ghostrunner, so what does add?
At first glance, not much. The opening third of the game is set within the boilerplate cyberpunk Dharma Tower, with the neon-soaked environments indistinguishable from the first game.
There are some fresh gameplay twists: you can now actively block, shuriken has been upgraded to an ability you can anywhere, you can earn perks that modify gameplay, and there are ‘Ultimate’ attacks crucial for getting out of a pinch.
But you’d be forgiven for writing this off as fine-tuning rather than a revolutionary change, and I couldn’t help but think this felt more like a good DLC rather than a sequel.
Then you get to wrap your robot thighs around a throbbing Akira-style motorcycle and… hot damn, now this is a sequel.
The bike (which was the centrepiece of the excellent demo) unlocks roughly one-third into the game and radically shakes up the gameplay. There’s entire levels devoted to whistling through tangled roads while dodging obstacles, with you spending as much time airborne after boosting off huge ramps as you do with your tyres on the asphalt.
I have to give special notice to an absolutely killer mechanic included here: you can leap off the bike at high speed, with it continuing to whip along the road below you (if you’re lucky, ploughing through enemies) then, while still airborne you grapple back down onto it and speed off into the distance.
The bike also opens up a level that switches up the tightly choreographed linear level design into an open world, giving you some rare quiet moments as you chart a path through urban ruins. Sadly you soon have to kiss your metal steed goodbye to proceed with the game and, though a very fun new movement ability is soon granted to you, it’s not as fun as this kickass motorbike.
The sequel is also a notable upgrade when it comes to boss encounters. I still have nightmares about Ghostrunner’s frustrating revolving laser tower of death boss and though Ghostrunner 2 provides some tricky opponents, there are mid-boss checkpoints that will gradually ease you through their whirling blades and energy blasts.
But it’s not all great. I’m not entirely sure how much Ghostrunner 2 wants me to care about its story, though it can’t be a good sign that I got to the final boss and didn’t know who this guy was or why he was so mad at me.
I swear I was paying attention as much as I could, but a lot of crucial plot information is delivered while you’re cyber-parkouring across the world, and it’s hard to pay attention to whatever’s being burbled down the radio when you’re trying to nail a series of tricky jumps.
Between missions, you can slowly explore your home base and chat to your support crew, though watching an iffily animated talking head deliver exposition isn’t compelling when I could be decapitating cyborgs at a hundred miles an hour instead.
As with Ghostrunner there’s the occasional technical snafu. The game hard-locked a few times (though the constant checkpoints meant I didn’t lose progress) and there were sound glitches when an effect repeated itself over and over. There were a number of other minor bugs along the way, but it the game has now had its launch patch and, though I haven’t played too much after the update, it seems more stable.
There are few games out there doing what the Ghostrunner series does. This is hard as nails and fast as hell, demanding patience, quick reflexes and a mastery of its mechanics.
For some it’ll be an excruciatingly unfair ordeal, but for others? Well, as samurai legend Miyamoto Musashi said:
"It may seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first."
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