Ghostrunner Review (VioletMoon)
The game is cool. It looks visually pretty fantastic. When things are working, its very fun. I love dashing into a crouch slide just as i go off an edge to get a ton of momentum and fly into an unsuspecting enemy. I love dashing to the side of bullets only to dash back in and kill them from the side. I love reflecting an enemies projectile back at them while on the move. I love speedrunning, I love cyberpunk, I love clean movement in video games, and I love the feeling of pulling off a high-skill maneuver to defeat a worthy opponent.
But I can't stand playing this game, and I won't be finishing it. The movement is not clean or consistent at all. I've died at least a 100 times because trying to wallrun bounced me off of the wall in a weird direction and I was too low to recover. I've died countless times because I was randomly shot from an enemy I couldn't see while moving at the speed of light. I've died a few dozen times from trying to jump up and grab the rails that you zipline with only to just inexplicably *not grab it* and fall to my death. And I've died way, way too many times because trying to move fast made it so that I just didn't touch the ground and could no longer reliably control my character and flew off an edge. Nothing about it feels consistent or rewarding. I stuck with it for a few extra hours because I assumed I just needed to get good and maybe I would find the fun after a few dozen hours or something, but hearing from a friend that theres more long walking simulator parts in the later half of the game, I'm not wasting more time.
I just want to go fast and fight the enemies. But this game wants me to go slow and fight the mechanics. Despite having a lot of the trappings of a skill-based speed game, it seems to reward doing the boring, patient, low-skill strategy most of the time. In the end, I'm left feeling like all of my deaths were bullshit, and my successes are lucky instead of earned. I just can't find enough of the fun to outweigh the utter misery and frustration that playing the game normally has given me.