Ghostrunner

 


Ghostrunner might be one of the most annoying games I’ve ever forced myself to finish. You die in one hit, every enemy seems designed to kill you instantly, and instead of feeling like you’re improving, it turns into memorizing the same 20-second sections over and over again. By the time it was over, I wished I hadn’t even bothered.

I knew very little about Ghostrunner before playing it. Just took a quick glance at it on Steam, saw its 3D, it has lots of reviews, its a single player campaign, its first person, so I eventually got it for cheap.

Starting up the game and looking at the menu options and once again its clear its an Unreal engine game, been playing a lot of those recently.
The game then starts up without much of an introduction, a short voiceline and youre instantly playing, which is great.
There's a short tutorial teaching you the basics of movement, its basically a 3D platformer game where  you move fast, can run along walls, dodge, slide, all that stuff.
The wall riding is handled sort of automatic, you just jump at a wall and he starts running at it for you, dont need to press any buttons.

But before long the game reveals the twists it has up its sleeves which separates it from most other games. Its the fact that you die in a single bullet. You only have 1 health. So the gimmick of the game is that its hard. At first you might think this is a fun novelty, this could set it apart and make it something interesting. But it quickly becomes apparently just how downright annoying this is.

You go through level after level, of almost the exact same looking factory setting, doing platforming sections jumping across walls, at one point you get a grappling hook which is admittedly fun to use zipping around, although the platforming controls are less than amazing, especialy the dodge ability controls janky as hell, you try to dodge to the sides but often he dodges forwards getting you killed, because holding shift ONLY while in the air makes it go into slow motion you can then dodge left and right away from bullets but it acts differently on the ground, its just a clusterfuck really. Then after a platforming segment you usually come to a room filled with enemies with set spawn points. You usually have to kill every single enemy in the room to progress to the next room. What ends up happening is more often than not a tedious slog of trial and error bullshit until youve memorized every single enemy placement and memorized down to the millosecond of when their bullets will travel across the screen, it gets old fast.

The game knows its tedious bullshit, evidenced by the fact that you get checkpoints VERY frequently.  Every 20 seconds you get a checkpoint.  Every single time you make an inch of progress, youre expected to die 50+ times and replay the last 20 second segment over and over and over until you memorized it and finally get past it by a stroke of luck. Its very tedious game design, I don't understand how its supposed to be fun. I don't mind hard games, but I enjoy hard games when it feels fair and it feels like I have to develop as a player and understand the game, this game does not feel like that, it feels like youre just expected to die dozens of times on each new checkpoint, its like, imagine playing a Call of Duty game on VETERAN mode, except you dont have a gun, and even worse you die in 1 single bullet. Does that sound fun? Its not.

Its not so much that you only have one health, its that everyting combined with that fact feels like obnoxious game design more than overcoming genuine challenge and developing player skill. Take the fact that many times you cannot kill enemies unless you go around the arena and destroy these stupid blue orbs floating on the walls. What the hell is this shit? Its so arbitrary and goofy. So youre running across walls trying to track down these dumb blue orbs, trying to not get randomly one shot, because since its a first person game you can barely ever see where you're getting shot from so you frequently just die out of thin air with no idea why, it just all comes together to be a frustrating annoying experience more than anything. You have to platform around the areans, but even the platforming controls suck you freuqently are accidentally bouncing off the wrong walls, grabbing onto the wrong ledge, randomly flying across the screen in places you dont want to, it just sucks. I quickly began to hate this game.

The game incentivzes you to keep running and never stop, because the longer youre running the faster you move, which means its harder for the enemies to hit you. I actually like this mechanic, and it was kind of satisfying building up speed, but it never really reaches any full potential because the controls are so janky. One moment you'll vault over a wall and you will barely launch in the air, but the next time youll do it and youll be sent flying across the screen. The physics are so inconsistent and random that it all just falls apart.


You have various abilities you get as you progress through the game, first is Blink, which snaps you to an enemy and instantly kills them, however these abilities have a massive cooldown. The next ability is Tempest, which shoots like a gust of air that knocks enemies down. Then you have Surge towards the end of the game, this is finally a ranged attack, where you shoot out a blast towards an enemy, finally around the end of the game you get Overlord which lets you mindcontrol an enemy who then fights against other enemies for a short duration. Although I didnt find the abilities exciting or even useful at all, I mostly just used Blink the whole game because at least Its guaranteed a kill, the Tempest ability is almost a worse blink because you can sometimes miss, and its not that often youre attacking multiple enemies anyway, Surge was very useful for certain segments but you get it late, and Overlord you only have for around an hour before the game ends anyway, although it is useful.

You randomly unlock upgrades, I guess completing levels, the upgrades work  by opening a menu and playing Tetris to assort different pieces into your upgrade slots, its dumb too. Why do I have to play tetris to equip upgrades? It just wastes time, whats the point? The upgrades are kind of interesting, stuff like get a second dash, further distance on the abilities, theres upgrades you can get that makes it so you can smack bullets back at enemies which was kinda useful for a bit, but trying to get the timing right more than often just gets you killed so I quickly just said screw it and stopped using it. Other useful upgrades is the ability to put a highlight around enemies, and even through walls, which can be helpful. But really at a certain point I realized all I care about is making my cooldown on using my ability faster, and guess what? The less upgrades you use, the faster your cooldown is! So at that point I pretty much stopped using upgrades all together just so my cooldown can be faster. The only upgrade I used for the bulk of the game then was the one that also further sped up cooldown. What a dumb design choice. Put all these upgrades in the game and now I dont even want to use them because I'd rather just have my cooldown come back faster, this game is just designed poorly and makes no sense.

If youre not doing mostly bad platforming sections or bad combat sections in factories, then commonly between levels you go into this cyberspace matrix area which have bad puzzles. Why are there these random shitty matrix segments? They suck too. Its either you have to jump around on some platforms as if its Super Mario Sunshine without the FLUDD pack, or its really really stupid puzzles, flicking some switches to connect a grid, or navigating your way around rooms with walls you have to walk through, or going around collecting these glowing orbs to open a locked door (these segments SUCKED),  Why is everything about this game just so fucking bad? It didnt take long for me to be sighing and moaning constantly playing this stupid shit, I really did not enjoy this game. I cant think of really anyhting I actually like about this game besides maybe the grappling hook, not even killing enemies feels satisfying everything dies in one hit it just doesnt feel that impactful or fun.


Theres not much of a story or cutscenes in the whole game, instead the entire game you just have people talking in your ear, one man and one woman, the woman acts as a sort of sympathetic sidekick while the man acts as a probable nefarious ally guiding you along. Thats about all there is to the story. Youre some kind of cyborg created in a lab from cells to go on secret missions or some shit, I didnt really care.

Thats pretty much the entire game, you go through sterile boring generic metalic factory enviornemnts , or a few times some city roof levels, youre platforming around hookshotting, gliding along walls avoiding traps and hazards usually the walls can shoot out electrified pulses, saw blades, stuff liike that, its like Super Meat Boy 3D or some crap, you get to arena segments where you usually have to kill every enemy, the types of enemies are regular soldiers that shoot at you with pistols, theres a machine gun soldier which has a reload window, theres these melee enemies that jump across the screen at you, theres ninja enemies that charge at you and slice you with a blade, the only way to kill them is to wait until they charge then attack parrying them and stunning them, then theres flying ship enemies you can jump onto to disable, there are mech enemies that shoot that giant pulse wave, and so on. Like I said, the enemies seem to just be designed to be as irritating as possible, expecting you to die many times until you fully memorized their exact patterns, its almost like an NES game but more grueling, at least in NES games you have more health, like even Ninja Gaiden NES you have more than 1 health.

I think the game only has two boss fights, one of them where you get in a sword battle and thankfully it wasnt too hard, it was actually eaiser than most of the game which was totally odd. I failed maybe twice. You just have to time your attacks at the same time the boss moves the blade. The other boss fight is the last boss which what do you know is some complete inane dog shit, you have to play Jump Rope with the boss swinging her metal arms around, whats next? Hop Skotch boss fight? What a stupid fucking game. Of course this took me like 50 deaths to figure out WTF I was supposed to do, which is the nature of the game. Then you realize you have to stand in certain spots so the boss hits these metal boxes and breaks them, then the floor starts exploding with electric pulses and at one point the ENTIRE arena is covered and I couldnt figure out what to do, 50 deaths later I realize the top segment is suddenly no longer electric and I can hookshot onto it, another couple dozen deaths and rinse repeat I beat the last boss, End credits, thank fuck thats ovver.
But overall the game is just uneventful and a slog really.

The only other mechanic the game has really is at times in the levels you can pickup these powerups, be it slow motion to run past some wind turbine, or shurikens where you can finally throw and kill enemies, but these are on a timer until you have to go back and pick them up again. It didnt add much to the game, they didnt come up that often, and they were just another random obstacle in your way to keep you from progressing, the shuriken one was not that useful and did not popup very often, its like the devs know if you give the player any ounce of power the game becomes trivial so they do this nonsense timed powerup thing to keep you from not dying 50 times per encounter, once again it sucks.

At one point I got sick of the repetition so I just stood still and waited for my damn Surge ability to recharge, pop out of a corner and take down one single enemy, a mech, or whatever, then run back in cover and just wait for my cooldown over and over and keep ranged attacking enemies just to progress without having to repeat the same checkpoint over and over. Thats how boring and stupid of a playstyle I arrived at. There was a few turret segments where instead of the stupid deathfest I just did this and waited for my ranged attack to keep recharging and took out the turrets from far away. Dumb game design.

I dont like how every level is inside the same boring like, Unreal Engine stock asset pack factory set, or you have a few levels that are inside this city of city rooftops but it still feels ike youre enclosed in a factory really,  I don't like the music how it sounds like the entire game youre inside a bad obnoxious rave party droning on and on, I dont like the stupid one hit deaths, I dont like the dumb puzzles in the matrix areas in between levels, I dont like the people rattling in your ear constantly, I dont like the premise of how you just have a sword as your only weapon , I dont like the enemies, it seems like their only purpose is to be as irritating as possible with all the different "GOTCHA" designs, like enemies that leap across the screen and one hit you (that you can barely ever see, because again, its first person), or the mech enemies that shoot giant waves that go across your entire screen that pretty much obliterate you no matter where you are, I dont like the platforming sections with the shit controls, I don't like the dumb gimmicky upgrades having to play Tetris just to equip upgrades, I don't like the graphics which although its an Unreal Engine 4 game the assets just seem slightly cartoony , generic sterile and not very impressive.

The game is often glitchy and broken, too.  The indicator for where the enemy is attacking you from makes no sense often, it will say theres an enemy behind you but theres not. The objective marker/description is often broken and makes no sense, at one point I had the same objective text for like 5 levels and it was pointing to a senseless place.


I livestreamed the whole playthrough of this game and pretty much the entire time I was just whining and complaining, it wasn't fun at all, just painfully annoying and tedious. I was just constantly waiting for it to be over. It never got better, I never felt like I was getting better or 'figuring out' the game, I just always thought it sucked. Like if you skim throughout my entire playthrough everything just looks the same the whole time and I'm probably complaining every step of the way. How does this game have a very positive rating on Steam? How do people like this? What is there to enjoy? I dont get it. What else can I say? I'm struggling to think of the positives, the one thing that would be positive is the movement but even that feels janky like the controls would frequently not do what I wanted bouncing off surfaces, I guess the one thing I can compliment is I appreciate the game for trying something different, for having a gimmick and unique twist, the one hit death thing and the trial and error memorizing enemies, I like that its trying to be difficult and interesting, but I just think the execution is pure frustration with zero reward or satisfaction for overcoming its annoyances. At least I beat the game in one session in around 7 hours, but even then it felt like a drag and should of ended sooner.

3/10