izigame.me

Review after playing 90 minutes, so please take that into consideration. I also need to let off some steam and am admittedly using this game as a bit of a punching bag, however this negative review is genuine. I'll try to make it constructive.
Ghostrunner: a game set in a large panel factory the size of Aperture Science, where you play as a cyborg Faith Connors with dialogue that isn't even a little bit engaging.
I love games with cool movement. This is a game that looks like it has cool movement. It's passable for the most part, but needs more work. I seem to magnetise to walls even if I am trying to fall straight down instead of to wallrun. Unless you're sliding down a sloped surface, momentum isn't much of a factor, which takes a lot of energy away from my desire to send me and my blade hurtling towards enemies. I'm sure this is done so players don't lose control of the character, but I yearn to travel faster than I'm able to at this point and the abrupt stop after dashing is killing my flow. There are puzzle sections, for some reason, and the type of puzzle keeps changing, for some reason. These are so painfully out of place I was asking myself why I was even bothering to continue. I'm still walking around in a physical play area but now I can't dash or do anything relevant to the main gameplay loop. Why am I doing this? Why is this in the game? I can see the effort that has gone into the level design, but sadly it ends up being quite disappointing; the platforming with combat feels unintuitive sometimes and the platforming without combat is bulky and takes up far too much game time. I presume this is to give the dialogue enough space to actually play out, but frankly the story is not particularly engaging up to this point.
The writing and voice acting leave much to be desired. I understand the robotic nature of the interactions between 74 and The Architect, but I don't think this is a fair reason to have the world-building essentially be an infodump explained at our character. The world desperately wants you to know about it, but has very little tact or subtlety when doing so and has no interest of actually serving the gameplay at all. As someone who tends to align with anti-capitalism, I still wasn't compelled by the story being lazily draped over the same tropes of corporate oppression and egregiously steep class divide. It seems to be more set dressing than anything deemed worth exploring. Additionally, when you first hear Zoe's voice lines, it sounds like someone sat in front of a microphone who was told to "sound desperate" while reading their lines. Despite her apparently sending out calls for help for so long, it sounds like this is her first time doing so. She's not fatigued, dejected, nor demonstrating any amount of personality like you would realistically expect of this character, and she simply doesn't sound like the interesting character she could have been.
At 1.5 hours of gameplay, I realised I just wasn't having as much fun as other games could have provided. It's not that the game is "too hard", but rather that the challenge comes from imprecise controls and level design, as well as uninteresting writing and direction. Only so many situational awareness issues can be blamed on player error before one must ask why the sound design is dragging its feet. A couple times I found myself zoning out and blocking projectiles based on the time interval between shots while wondering why I wasn't just having a nap instead.
Ghostrunner has some good ideas in terms of mechanics and world design, and does deliver to a certain extent, but fails to make them interesting or fun enough for me to persist with the game at the moment. There is so much that could have been done better, and maybe they succeeded in the sequel, but I don't currently plan to find out.
If you really want to play it, get it while on sale. It's 75% off at the time of writing.